I’m over tinkering with my OS. So I’m looking for a distro that “just works” out of the box for my laptop. Also I want to test an “easy” distro I can install for my grandpa.
I don’t care for immutability, declarative config, being fully FOSS or having the newest stuff. I don’t want snaps, or a software center that relies on them. So no Ubuntu.

What I do want (ideally out of the box):
Important:

  • as few annoying visible bugs and crashes as possible (looking at you, Ubuntu)
  • Wayland support
  • good package selection, so no independent fringe distro
  • fluid YouTube videos, streaming, pre-installed codecs

Less important:

  • ideally with Gnome
  • encrypting the hard drive from within the GUI installer
  • nice font rendering (used to be a problem, but I guess not anymore)
  • installing Steam with a button press
  • pre-installed sane-airprint and sane-airscan (automatic setup of my networked printer-scanner-combo)

You get the idea. The usual stuff (low-end gaming, browsing, streaming, printing, scanning) should just work. I don’t have any hardware that poses a problem.
From what I’ve read, Mint doesn’t yet support Wayland and doesn’t ship with video codecs anymore. (Or am I wrong?)
What are the other options? Is Zorin king of the block now? Is Manjaro good now?

Thanks for any and all input.

  • @[email protected]
    7•6 months ago

    Fedora might be a good option, but it might require more setup with an Nvidea GPU. They use Wayland now, are a Gnome based distro, support full disk encryption. For me the package mangar has been fine, and they do support flatpak. It is a very large distro with backing from RedHat. So it should generally be stable.

    Pop_OS! Seems to be the great distro if you just want to game and watch videos without any issues arround setting up the drivers. It has been a quite stable distro for me and it is quite similar to Ubuntu. Unfortunately this distro doesn’t have Wayland yet.

    Manjaro is an Arch based distro, but it had some issues with using packages from the AUR. They do run Gnome on Wayland by default.