Totally agree!
I tried many distros, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Manjaro. Now I’m using Mint, I’m just happy with it and I’ll keep it for a while. 
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After fiddling with Suse and Debian in the very past, I put my Win 11 machine to the next level and now I’m happily running Mint Xia on a 6.14 kernel, managed to get OpenCL running with the onboard Iris XE. So I have a nice system now that was not too fast with darktable on Win 11 but is really doing a nice job on Linux.
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I use Aurora, also based on Kinoite. May I ask what problems you were having? Greatest problem for me after one year of use is not having access to VirtualBox. I have a few machines and they didn’t convert well.
Don’t remember exactly. I think there werde some WiFi issues and the function keys for brightness and sound on my laptop didn’t work. Minor stuff like that.
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Short feedback from my recent installation of tumbleweed on my desktop PC:
- i had to manually edit the boot configuration on the usb-stick to “nomodeset” in order for the installer to actually start. this is almost a “no-go” problem for users without console experience. very strange.
- some things do not work out of the box, especially with flatpak installed software. i never know how to give these programs what permissions. is there some kind of tutorial how to use this?
- i tried to install OBS with the virtual camera tool (in order to use droidcam with a zoom conference) but i was absolutely not able to successfully get the virtual camera button.
- almost all other software worked pretty straight out of the box. nvidia GPU - no problem. davinci resolve - just some libraries to be moved and some packages to be installed but nothing that cannot be done with a youtube tutorial and some forum search.
- most interestingly rapid photo downloader now accepts my x-s10 which did not work under ubuntu for unclear reasons (gphoto library problem i assume).
- at first i tried the KDE plasma version but that did not work for me at all. i quickly installed the pure gnome desktop which works fine for me.
- one steam game (native linux, WH3) says that this is not a suitable linux distro for this game but plays it pretty problem free.
I hope this installation will stick for the next few years! for now i am very happy.
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- why does your system need nomodeset?
- for the virtual camera you need v4l2loopback-autoload. also are you using obs-studio from flatpak or the packman package?
- the flatpaks have their required permissions defined in their build. you can afterwards modify it with flatseal if needed - that package is on the way into TW
- what kde things didnt work?
- they probably only tested steamos or so and want to guide people to it.
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Yeah, I would also like to note that sometimes even with native Linux versions you gain more by running the windows version under Proton. Sad but true. Most Linux versions are not updated, get compatibility issues with shared libraries, etc, it’s a big mess. Steam runtime improves this a bit but it doesn’t work on every game
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why does your system need nomodeset?
i have no idea. without this setting the boot screen from the usb-stick would just stop loading at some point with a blank screen and a “_” top left. i found the solution with nomodeset in a forum where others had the same problem. -
for the virtual camera you need v4l2loopback-autoload. also are you using obs-studio from flatpak or the packman package?
i installed v4l2loopback, not sure about autoload though. i guess it was flatpak installation. i will follow your recommendation and report back. -
the flatpaks have their required permissions defined in their build. you can afterwards modify it with flatseal if needed - that package is on the way into TW
i have flatseal installed but i dont understand the settings. what i need is education . not too much you can do about it at the moment i guess 
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what kde things didnt work?
it worked but i was not able to find the things i needed. it also looks too much like old windows for my taste. but that is of course personal preference. -
they probably only tested steamos or so and want to guide people to it
agree.
I would say you should research what to enable after you have a problem. For example, say you install signal from flatpak and the clipboard doesn’t work, you need to go to flatseal and search for that setting, or just google it, should be pretty quick.
Same thing for files, etc, whenever a problem arises it’s almost due to lacking permissions. In a perfect world we would have a popup like in Android, but developer resources are limited, maybe in a few years 
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Unfortunately, that does not always work. Eg I could not get GPU acceleration to work under Darktable / Flatpak no matter what I tried.
I am totally OK with Flatpak/Snap packages when they work, but when I run into a problem I learned to head back to compiling from source as the first thing instead of chasing a solution in Flatpak etc. Much less time wasted on average.
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I agree. I believe native solutions should be the first choice for software, and only then flatpak. The only exception is non FOSS software or big electron apps and so on.
yeah e.g. our obs-studio was updated a few minutes after release
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well obs-studio checks if you have the module loaded and only then enables the button. I added the autoload package to make this easier.
which makes me wonder if the flatpak could even access that information. 
there is also ntsync-autoload to automatically load and setup the kernel module, which will speed up wine/proton a lot.
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problem solved thanks to restarting … my bad.
i have the flatpak and autoload without any changes.
Under heavy load (a numerical calculation running in the background with 24 threads, editing photos on DT while I was waiting for the results, and a browser open with about 50 tabs) my laptop would occasionally give up, in the sense that the Wayland compositor would quit and I would get back a login prompt.
So, it only has 16GB ram, but that’s what swap is for, isn’t it? Yes, but apparently the Ubuntu installer created an 512MB swapfile, ie 1/32 of the RAM. Frankly, I struggle to see the point if that… but in any case it was trivial to fix.
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That’s weird. My 24.04 has a swap of ¼ of the RAM (if htop is to be trusted). 8 GB for 32. And when I installed the OS, I was at 24 instead of 32, now that I think about it.
I would recommend setting up zram if you haven’t yet, it’s much better and you can get 8-16GB of very fast swap.
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the point of this minimal swap is to give the kernel memory handler some space to reorganize memory.
it is useful.
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