I found my virtual machine again and tested your settings.
The apps I tried before still don’t work, but the apps you mentioned open indeed. Gimp prints warnings though that are not present on Fedora.
If I have time on a weekend, I might look if the problems are obvious to solve
Mmmh, fast and they use vanilla GNOME?
Sounds interesting.
Do you have personal experience with it?
Avonds, Julian!
Yes, I have a little experience using Clear Linux.
Very fast on my Ryzen machine — but the Nvidia implementation
was not especially stable 
Mvg
Claes in Lund, Zweden
I can’t say I’ve had any issues with 'buntus, recently I tried Kubuntu 20.10
Of course, my GPU is supported directly by the kernel. (AMD RX580).
I thought you were a Manjaro fan, @Claes?
Good to know 
I ended up installing Fedora Silverblue
Clear Linux is fast because they only build for recent CPUs and they use a different kernel scheduler. You can switch the scheduler on just about any distro, provided you have the skill.
@Brian_Innes You are right, I do like Manjaro, but now and then I am itching to test/time something new…
The new Fedora has a different scheduler as well.
Perhaps Fedora would be a good change from Ubuntu?
Perhaps… but I am safely back in the Manjaro/Gnome group. Feels more safe, secure and comfortable.
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.
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…
To avoid bloat, install Ubuntu Server then use apt to add only the packages you need
Desktop environments tend to be bloated and buggy. XFCE (Xubuntu) is a decent performer in that arena, if you really must use a DE.
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).
File manager: ranger or dired with ranger emulation
Text editor / programming IDE: neovim or Doom Emacs
Shell: zsh or closh / babashka
Music player: cmus
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.
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.
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
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
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!
