Back in a former era, 'twas quite easy to install a flavour of 'buntu.
Evidently, these days it is not so.
This afternoon I fetched Ubuntu 20.10 in order to time a few things.
It hang when trying to find 3rd party drivers. (Yes, that is a known bug.)
Then I fetched Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
It hang in a forever-loop at login. (Yes, that is a known bug.)
Are things/hardware combinations too complicated these days?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I updated one box from Neon 18.04 to 20.04 and its fine.
I havenāt been able to do-release-upgrade on my Ubuntu 20.04 box yet (which has been continuously upgraded from 14.04).
Not sure why, but it tells me I havenāt installed all upgrades.
Iāve been Ubuntu since my first steps in Linux, but Iām seriously thinking in switching to Manjaro, given the current bugs.
If Iām not wrong, Ubuntu desktop is no longer a goal for Canonical, and that seems to have hurt quality and stability.
If the upgrade doesnāt spontaneously enable itself, I may try Pop!OS from System76.
In fact, I might as well try it on my old System76 laptopā¦
Just installed 20.10 on a bare AMD Ryzen machine, no problems. And, once I figured out that some graphics cards require their own power (&#*$%!), I was able to get dual monitors going. Havenāt tried proprietary drivers yet.
Also did do_release_upgrade on my other two machines, no problems there either.
I donāt get fancy with hardware or configurations, so YMMVā¦
If you all are itchng for something new, and are comfortable with Linux in general, let me introduce you to NixOS.
I installed 20.04 LTS as a dual boot beside Win 10 on one machine a few months ago, and both the install and ongoing operation have been pretty problem-free. My laptop (which started at 14.04) is still on 18.04 LTS and has been on its knees begging me to upgrade, but I havenāt had time to do that. The only hassle Iāve had with it was on the 16.04 to 18.04 upgrade the login screen would flip 180 degrees every couple of seconds (but the mouse clicks would stay in the āproperā position even when the displayed contents were flipped)ā¦fun to interact with!
I am a long time Debain user, that being said my desktop and a laptop have been on Fedora for a while now. But, Iāve been dissatisfied with the *buntu range for about the last decade. I tend to recommend Fedora as the more user-friendly desktop distro these days. Canonical spent too much time on projects that went no where only to abandon them (Unity, Mir and upstart to name a few) and it kind of makes me wonder where they are going. IMO the Ubuntu experience is quite lacking on the desktop and has been for a long while.
If you have to have a Ubuntu-base I tend to prefer Linux Mint. Iām not a huge fan of Cinnamon though.
Manjaro all the way. Iāve often had Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros break on me for the stupidest reasons.
Manjaro has been a dream.
According to the Phoronix site, Clear Linux is very fast for Ryzen machines as well.
Unfortunately, it did not like my TU-116 GFX 
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I never really got why Ubuntu is so popular. They do stable, LTS releases from debian testing and have a track record of not fixing bugs there. Why would anyone use that over debian stable? Maybe because they have a marketing department and are āthe easy way of linuxā. And if you want a more up-to-date system, then go with a rolling release distro or something like Fedora that releases twice a year. Or support debian by using debian testing as a rolling release, which is mostly stable and mostly up-to-date - running my laptop on it since years.
NixOSās approach to package versioning and installing is very interesting. The problem that a lot of modern software stacks donāt fit anymore with the āonly one version of a library/package on one systemā-principle is a big one for traditional distros. Looks like NixOS is the antithesis to that: Everything is isolated from everything else, making arbitrary combinations of libraries possible. Sounds like a security nightmare though, and I hoped I could read on how that is solved. However what I found is a 2-member security team and a 25-pages long list of open security issues on github: https://nixos.org/teams/security.html. They seem to do a cracy good job at keeping track of security issues, however they donāt seem to be addressed. I probably just donāt understand the process though. For me to trust it enough to use it, Iād need some high-level explanation of how security-related things work and why I can trust it - and that I couldnāt find. If anybody knows, please let me know (@paperdigits ?).
Tried nixos a few weeks ago and I couldnāt get flatpak to work properly. Does it work fine for you?
@rasimo the readme in GitHub - NixOS/security explains how issues are related back to their packages. Iām not full up on their security posture, but nixos does run my webserver, home servers, and editing machine.
@julian FlatpakĆ¢ĀĀthe future of application distribution there are also a few other options you can peruse, but it works for me.
Iāve been liking NixOS because once you understand the packaging format, building things and keeping them up to date is trivial. You can pick and choose what versions of packages you want, and they all compile into your system.
Its declarative configuration, so if I get new hardware, I can easily recreate my machine.
ZFS support is good and is a priority for them.
You can roll back to previous system states, chosen at the grub menu.
You can have multiple versions of the same package.
Even on my Ubuntu laptop, Iām using nixpkg and nix-shell to do a lot of work. I can easily get all the stupid versions of nodejs I need without hastle.
Yes, the features of NixOS are indeed very tempting.
I followed the flatpak setup you linked, but random bugs appeared, most flatpaks couldnāt even be started. Maybe Iāll try it again and see if I can get it working 
I have:
services.flatpak.enable = true;
xdg.portal.enable = true;
xdg.portal.extraPortals = [ pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-gtk pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-kde ];
And I have flatpak and flatpak-builder in my system packages.
Hi, I had been using Debian for a long time but at the moment itās unusable for be because of the nvidia driver issue and some other bugs. Downgrading the kernel is too annoying for me.
I am now on the LXDE community edition of Manjaro with the 5.4 lts kernel. I am running it since several months and it seems reliable.
I also have Ubuntu Mate 20.04 on my ssd for testing purposes and emergency situations. But there are some, mostly not so serious bugs in Ubuntu.
Thinking of trying Arco Linux with some tiling window manager. Is anybody using it? The bspwm edition of Manjaro looks interesting, too. But lately I am too lazy to install osās just out of curiosity, although I am totally bored of LXDE.
I would like to switch back to Debian or something Debian based. Hope they will fix the bugs.
If I understood the docs correctly, the bonus entries should not be necessary with my GNOME environment.
Iāll try them nonetheless, thanks for the tip!
Iām using i3 or KDE, I donāt know about GNOME. Spotify is a blank window, but digiKam, gimp, flatseal, and several others are working fine.
In case you are experimentally inclined: read the phoronix site,
and then test Clear Linux. Very fast, even if for Ryzen CPUs
(it is tailored for Intel CPUs.)
However, Clear Linux does not seem to like a Nvidia GFX, though.