I must say I’ve never gotten into Gnome… Perhaps I need to force myself to use it for a good while!
I’ve been using KDE for a while.
Thought it was time to see the other side.
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I used Ubuntu for a long time back in the day (the 7.04 - 10.04 era), and it seemed more stable back then. Nowadays I still run it from time to time to experiment with things. Since I experimented with various distros and desktop environments and window managers over the years, here are some tips…
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To avoid bloat, install Ubuntu Server then use apt to add only the packages you need
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Desktop environments tend to be bloated and buggy. XFCE (Xubuntu) is a decent performer in that arena, if you really must use a DE.
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You could use a tiling window manager (dwm or stumpwm) with keyboard shortcuts (xbindkeys for dwm, already baked-in in stumpwm) instead of desktop environments, menus and panels as this approach both saves system resources and allows you to run apps quickly using said shortcuts. Also, you don’t have to re-learn everything over the years (e.g. Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 switch, or KDE3 to KDE4 or Windows XP to 7 to 8 to 10 GUI changes).
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File manager: ranger or dired with ranger emulation
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Text editor / programming IDE: neovim or Doom Emacs
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Shell: zsh or closh / babashka
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Music player: cmus
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Video player: mplayer / mpv
The bonus of this configuration is that I can simply copy my config files to another machine and I’m ready to go. And this machine could be a retro PC from the early 2000s or a more recent Xeon server. Configure once, keep using the same config over the years. No headaches with bloat and breaking changes (unlike GNOME / KDE).
Speaking from personal experience (both personal usage and production server administration), you might have a more polished, less buggy experience from FreeBSD and OpenBSD. These 2 don’t suffer from countless distros that duplicate effort, nor from systemd. I experienced less severe bugs there compared to Ubuntu and Manjaro.
FreeBSD had (and still has) ZFS way before Linux. It has excellent overall and network performance, and amazing low-latency audio. ZFS snapshots can be very useful. The ports system allows you to build your own flavors of packages (this approach is used in Gentoo). It might be useful to compare Darktable performance under FreeBSD vs Linux.
OpenBSD is the least bloated of them all and the most secure, but not as fast. It’s solid like a tank, though. It’s excellent for old machines due to low resource usage. Darktable works here as well.
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I don’t know what kind of strange problems you all have.
2007 ubuntu (Gnome 2)
2011 ubuntustudio (XFCE)
2018 xubuntu (XFCE) due to a known problem with the RT kernel and power management
2019 ubuntu Budgie X
2020 ubuntu (Gnome 3 X)
it all works all the time. Maybe because I don’t fool around when buying hardware. Lenovo ThinkPad all along.
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On monolithic kernels like Linux / BSD, buggy drivers can crash the whole system. Even on Thinkpads. And the newest and latest hardware (like Ryzen) could have shaky driver support for the time being. So it depends on the particular software + hardware combination. Generally, support for hardware that’s a few years old shouldn’t have issues.
Adventurous OS-hoppers could try a microkernel security-oriented OS such as Genode:
https://genode.org/
Then run all the other OSes isolated in Seoul / Virtualbox, mimicking the Qubes approach.
Well, that is one of the perks being an early adopter…
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, La Suède
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Hi over there,
W-e-l-l… I am presently experimenting with something completely different. Its wallpaper looks like this, to give you a small clue:
Care to have a guess about what it might be?
Have fun,
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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Hmmm.
So I’m trying Kubuntu 20.04.1 at the moment.
No end of issues trying to execute Appimages…
When I try to run one, after setting to to be executable, the following error pops up…
“Cannot mount AppImage, please check your FUSE setup”
Back to the drawing board I think!
Just relax and have fun :-)))
There are umpteen more distros to test!
/Santa Claes
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@Claes, I think I figured out my issues, setting up a shiny new user account in Kubuntu, and downloading a fresh copy of a few troublesome appissues (Kdenlive, Krita, and Mandelbulber2.24) while logged in as the shiny new user, no issues running these… So I suspect it’s some sort of config file issue on my old /home/brian folder, which I have retained from umpteen different distro installs over the past few years.
So perhaps time to back up my files, and do a clean install with a shiny new /home partition and user.
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Morning!
Yes, most presumably you have values in the “old” .config/.cache
that you ought not to copy into your “new” hidden folders.
Worth some experimentation!
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@Claes, I bought an 8tb external USB 3.0 drive, so I’m slowly backing all my photos and data up. Happily I found some photos from around 2009 / 2010 when I had some holidays down Dumfries & Galloway at the South West of Scotland 
Will be good to have a look at those again once they are safely backed up!
8TB? Gulp.
I remember what one of my gurus, Donald E Knuth, once wrote:
if only he had 4K core memory and 7 tape stations, of which 3 also
should be able to read backwards — then he could do anything
in this world.
He was right. But each run would take a l-o-n-g time to execute.
Days, perhaps.
I have often wondered how he would have reacted, had he been able
too see what I presently have at me feet…
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He’s still alive… ?
96KB
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I always say that developers should get machines a few generations old so they write optimised code 
(I say this as a developer who just got a company laptop with 64 GB of RAM, some 10 core processor and a 1 TB M2 SSD)
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PS: As far as I recall, Mr. Knuth wrote those lines in the 1960s…
Really is one of the main reasons I keep this Surface 3 around. That, and a Windows machine for testing the wininstallers I make with my gcc/mxe toolchain on Ubuntu. Using it right now for casual browsing because the Surface Pro 7 I received last week is on the way back to MS for exchange, broke horribly after just one day of use…