@baldwinjed sure, no problem. Grab some popcorn, I think this will be a bit long. 😄

It all began when I wanted to make a new partition for my drive. My current Windows instal was living in a 2TB SSD and I wanted to put data and system in separated partitions. Thanks to some system files I was unable to shrink the partition, and I was in the mood to nuke everything down, so I erased it and began from scratch.

Since I recently downloaded the latest Ubuntu, I figured to give it a go. Canonical was usually the most supported distro and largely favored by noobs, so why not? How bad could it be?

Well, really bad as I experienced. My machine for personal use and errands is a Galaxy Book2 360 (I have a Macbook for work) and it did not like Ubuntu at all, or Ubuntu did not like my machine. After the install, the screen brightness was locked at the maximum setting, and was the keyboard light. The sound was popping for some reason. I spent a good time looking for a fix, and managed to find an obscure setting that I should add to GRUB by copying and pasting that line to its settings file, then rebuilding the launcher.

Thing is, this apparently was assumed to be common knowledge, the grub thing. So here I go again searching what the heck was the file I was supposed to edit, and how to update the thing with the new setting. After botching the boot for some reason and reinstalling Ubuntu, I managed to get the screen brightness under control. But I still had the keyboard light on without any kind of control, and I left it at that.

A lot of other annoyances started to pile up. The battery life was abismal, and after some searching I installed tlp and powertop, did all the calibrations and settings adjustments, and it barely worked. My fingerprint reader was gone with no way to make it work, as I found no solution in any forums that could make it being recognized. Bluetooth was hit and miss, sometimes worked, sometimes refuses to work, and the same happened to audio. The fans loved to go for a spin for apparently no reason. And the machine was HOT.

I tried to install Thunderbird Supernova, the one with the new interface. It wasn't in the store, so I had to download it from the official site. It's a compressed folder that expands into the app folder, and if I click the executable the app runs. Fine, but it did not show on the Ubuntu dock nor was it in the apps list. So here I go, trying to figure out how to add a shortcut to this app on the dock. I found a way to solve it after a lot of search.

Bear in mind that all that tinkering was happening in the terminal, copying and pasting commands from forums with a rarefied notion of what those commands did. Not great if you ask me.

Then, one day, I got a prompt for a system update. Fine, an updated system is a happy and safe system! So I allowed it... It rebooted, and I was dropped into the command prompt. No error, no explanation. Gnome just stopped working.

At this point I was fed up with Ubuntu and tried Fedora. But then the same issue with the screen brightness happened and I gave up. I installed Windows 11 back, and after half an hour everything was installed, updated and working without hiccups. All I did was to click a couple of prompts, run one installer with all the drivers and BAM, a fully functional system - fingerprint reader included.

It could be an issue against Samsung laptops, but I had a Dell that came from the factory with Ubuntu. It worked out of the box, but the same ugly issues with apps and updates happened there too, so I don't believe that's solely an issue of compatibility. That same Dell laptop worked flawlessly when I installed Windows 10... Go figure.