I seem to be noticing a little bit of a trend lately that the out-of-box experience and overall quality of “mostly should just work” desktop-focused Linux distributions has declined. Usually, you could grab an .iso of distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro etc, install it and have a decent enough platform out of the box to tweak how you liked it. There might be some hardware you need to mess with to get working, or some small configuration changes to do, but these were mostly about personal preference as opposed to having to do them just to have a basically functioning system.

I recently built a new computer for work and naturally wanted to install a Linux distribution on it. I thought I’d try out a few desktop-focused ones to reduce the need to manually configure stuff like you’d do with an Arch install. The more curated and heavily moderated package systems are exactly what I wanted on this PC as stability/reliability was more important than bleeding edge for me. However, instead of just getting something usable and smooth like I was expecting, each distro I tried out had a bunch of basic issues:

• Fedora: issues with Flatpak (that somehow got missed by 2 separate maintainers and released), the fonts look like crap again without a lot of tweaking (AA used to just work properly out of the box) and the XFCE spin is completely broken. To even get XFCE I had to install the Gnome version then manually install the XFCE desktop and LightDM the latter of which didn’t even pull in all its dependencies to function.

• Manjaro: I can’t even update this out of the box without manual intervention because of a conflict between packages on a fresh installation. The problem has existed for a while apparently. Such a basic problem in the core package management of a distribution out of the box is unacceptable.

• Ubuntu: I tried Kubuntu (used to be my favorite) and the KDE desktop experience by default completely sucks now. Even with graphics drivers installed and tweaking the settings a bit it screen tears on my Nvidia 3080 and performs like trash. I don’t know how we even got to this point when Linux desktop environments used to be the slickest thing since butter was invented.

I’m a long time Linux user (since the 90s), former Linux sysadmin and a programmer so I know my way around a Linux system. All of the above problems can mostly be fixed. However, by now in 2023 I’m expecting all of these major distributions to at least nail down the basics and I’m finding it’s just not the case, in fact it feels like things have sadly gone backwards.

Update: I ended up giving Mint Cinnamon a shot after a few people mentioned it here and it ended up being good enough out of the box for me to run with it. I needed a Linux desktop that just basically worked so that I didn’t have to spend hours messing with it that I could be billing for work instead and Mint gave me that, so thank you for the suggestion. It’s been a real shame that other distributions are not as slick as Mint is from the start.