jhulian sevsixthis is why you should Debian
grueI usually use [K]ubuntu because I always try to install Debian first, but it ships with kernels so outdated that it rarely “just works” on the not-particularly-weird hardware I throw at it. That’s understandable when it’s missing drivers for my AMD 9070 XT GPU on launch day, but not so much when it’s missing drivers for the Intel AX101 wifi chipset that got released 3.5 years before.
poinckThen Fedora may be an option for you. They have a KDE spin.
Besides that, Debian is my default distro nowadays; everything just works for me.
I was using Gentoo previously for many years, because I didn’t require out-of-the-box back then.
I am an apt boi as well, but I recently switched to Fedora KDE spin. God has it been a breath of fresh air to have decently updated packages WITH stability on my desktop and laptop.
I’m still Debian all the way for server and “LTS” computers, like my HTPC, but Fedora is killing it overall.
I mean, Kubuntu has “decently updated packages WITH stability,” too. It just has Snap that annoys me, but that probably annoys me less than
command ‘apt’ not found would.
Snap and the stink of Canonical are the reason anything Ubuntu is not an option for me
caseyweedermanHmm.
When is the last time you tried Debian, and what version was it?
If I’m recommending it to people, I’d like to be able to warn them about potential hurdles.
When is the last time you tried Debian, and what version was it?
If I’m recommending it to people, I’d like to be able to warn them about potential hurdles.
A week or so ago, with whatever version was current as of a week or so ago. I was about to install Linux on my kids’ mini PCs, fired up the Debian live environment, and noticed that WiFi didn’t work. Switched to Kubuntu and the WiFi did work, so proceeded to install with that.
Technically, I suppose it’s possible that the actual installed kernel might’ve worked even though the live environment didn’t, but I didn’t want to take that chance. Plus, I needed networking in the live environment before install anyway, so I could copy a backup of the factory Win11 install to my other computer, just in case.
Hm. Did you see an option for “non-free firmware”? It should be included as an option since Debian major version 11.
You’re right about that. I wonder how it can be fixed so that other people don’t hit the same issue.
The other day, the extent of my investigation was to find this forum thread, dismiss it as “kernel too old” (even though the thread was from 2023, LOL), and move on to Kubuntu. Looking more carefully, it seems like my Debian 13.3.0 image (debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-kde.iso) should’ve shipped with a kernel new enough to include it (6.12, compared to “6.1 or 6.2” which is when the Intel employee in the forum thread said it was added), so now I’m not so sure what the real problem was.
It also just occurred to me that I should’ve jumped up to Debian Testing before resorting to Ubuntu (I wasn’t thinking too hard about it and just used the same flash drive as I had recently used to install it on my parents’ PC, which I really did want to be on Debian Stable). Oh well.
Regardless though, I think the main fix is “ship a newer kernel in the next version of the distro” and it’ll take care of itself over time.
I wonder if Forky would have worked.