I mean if he's having problems and spent hundred of hours trying to fix it, instead of giving up why not just try one of the mainstream distro and see if it works? There is a chance (however slim it is) that it'll work due to higher number of users exposing hardware support issues to the maintainers.
> Arch was the best distro I could find that used the latest kernel by default. Audio worked there.
That mirrors the experiences I’ve had. Most distros ship with broken old software and custom patches that make troubleshooting a nightmare. They also don’t have the resources to support the wide variety of hardware out there. Microsoft spends billions on Windows and vendors spend billions of their own to make sure hardware is mostly plug and play.
In Linux land, the mainstream distros ship with fragile duct-taped components that work if you’re lucky but are a complete pain to troubleshoot and are a bigger pain as time goes on and you have major upgrades.
Arch is the only sane distro with wide adoption and it’s a joy to use. I get the latest kernel with its bug fixes and hardware support. Packages are updated on a rolling basis so there are a few instances every year where I need to manually intervene, but not major breakages every 2 years.
Granted, it’s not for everyone. You have to recreate the fragile duct-taped components you get in other distros, which is an investment of time. You will know how and why your computer works though and will not have to resort to the Ubuntu stack exchange (or their other communities) for the magic formula that will fix your issues.
I’m hoping we can change hearts one by one with this message: Arch is not scary; it might solve the problems you’ve been having :D
> In Linux land, the mainstream distros ship with fragile duct-taped components that work if you’re lucky but are a complete pain to troubleshoot and are a bigger pain as time goes on and you have major upgrades.
Laughing in Fedora. Out of curiosity how much "mainstream distros" did you use?
Exactly my thoughts, Fedora should be given a try. I've had it on a number of laptops and desktops, and for the last few years for sure everything has just worked (tm).
The people for whom Ubuntu works usually have fewer requirements or are not as particular about things working _just right_.
That’s not to say I haven’t had issues with Arch, but there were fewer and they were easier to figure out.
Now if you want a distro where you can update packages without manual intervention several times a year, then it’s probably best to look past Arch.