Ubuntu is seriously an amazing achievement and while I've used plenty of distros, nothing compares in terms of getting work done. I'm not an OS engineer and have no desire to get granular with my OS, I just want to be able to load it up and do stuff. The linux community, however, is loaded with OS-enthusiasts who don't understand the difference between using a tool and fetishizing it.

Recently I’ve been using Linux more, as I used to. Have to say Ubuntu remains the most polished and useful of the distro’s overall. Just works most of the time.

Maybe, but Ubuntu does have drama like the Amazon search link thing and now uncontrollable auto-updating snap packages, which arguably seem like an absolutely terrible idea for any sort of server.

For almost everything, Debian works just as well as Ubuntu, but it's more boring and has less drama.

Except for the fact that they don’t include proprietary drivers in the official install image.

Well, that's pretty much the tradeoff you make when you use a distro that is aggressively free software.

Yeah I wasn’t worrying about that. I don’t think proprietary software is evil.

I don't either but it's a factor that distros take into account.

They offer non-free images on their website.

This sounds refreshing. I've been trying to convert from Mac to Linux recently and after having tried a couple of distros like Pop and Neon settled on fedora, mostly because of all the modern stuff in there (GNOME on Wayland with zoom supporting it OOTB, btrfs). After having used it for a week intensively, I have experience way too many issues (zoom freezing other windows, firefox crashing when resizing the window and DevTools open where I was thinking is it the React website that I'm just building?, Wifi dropping in the middle of a zoom session and not auto-reconnecting) let alone the different keyboard mapping which I have found too limiting (as everything is done with Ctrl when there are so many other meta keys and Ctrl is just the worst from a positioning perspective as I have to use my little finger instead of thumb like on macOS. Also, fedora asks for too many OS reboots and I don't like to restart the full dev environment all the time.

So far, I have converted back to macOS, which is equally bad from UX perspective, especially the hardened security - I just don't want to opt into every program getting the permission to run, send notifications, access this and that. It's just too much.

I think I will give one of the more non-corporate Linux distros a try. Or, maybe it's Pop, but ideally it should be Debian based, just not with the "outdated" experience.

The problem was not Fedora per se, but GNOME and especially Wayland. Wayland is slightly above vaporware and infested with bugs.

Had you chosen Fedora with KDE you'd probably have 0 problems. I'm using it without any drama for 11 years and I keep suggesting it to co-workers and friends.

Wayland has done so much harm in the Linux ecosystem and that gives me a lot of grief :(

It's a pity that it really is that bad. It didn't have any glitches during normal usage but it quickly fell apart when challenged, obviously. So it's probably still too early and we need more distros picking Wayland up and help stabilise.

What didn't help was probably the desire to force myself into liking GNOME, when normally, I fall naturally into the KDE camp, because it is beautiful without having to make things too simple, like GNOME does. Even though I agree with many of the things GNOME stands for, there is lots of stuff you wouldn't NEED to customise, or use.

Will consider KDE on my next attempt!

The GNOME Xorg session is still available if you need to use it.

It would be nice if it were possible to avoid the compatibility issues with Wayland, but the design of X (and the reliance of applications on X11-specific APIs) is what makes this not really feasible.

Wayland is such a big pain. Breaks all kinds of things.

It breaks some kinds of things, not all.

Those some things are things, you shouldn't do in the first place, like snooping on windows and events that do not belong to your app or injecting events that end up being processed by other apps.

If you don't do that, Wayland is fine.

I moved my Ctrl to the Caps-lock key many years ago, it is decent that way.

This is a great tip and possible on Windows with AutoHotKey and Mac with Karabinder Elements.

How does MacOS make zoom conferences painful? That's a strange claim to make.

I suspect they're referring to the fact that after the Zoom app is updated, you may find yourself in a meeting but unable to share a window because the updated app no longer has the "Screen Recording" privacy entitlement. Turning that on again requires quitting the app and therefore leaving the meeting.

This is exactly the issue. It's especially problematic when you are hosting a private meeting. When you exit, it will hang up on everyone, unless you hand control of the conference to a participant.

That does sound annoying. Though to be fair, Apple has plenty of reason to distrust Zoom updates. I'm a bit surprised there's no way for Zoom to re-try screen recording without re-launching the app. Is that a fundamental limitation of Apple's security model, or a failure of Zoom?

It is all Apple. When you change a permission, MacOS forces you to quit and re-launch the app.

It's also all-app: they can change their homemade updater to a normal non-hidden updater and have normal signed distribution that doesn't require any of this re-auth.

Not a strange claim. Having to exit the conference to give the Zoom app permission to share the screen is painful, and if the Zoom app updates, you have to do it again. That means you have to leave the conference to permission the app, and if you are the host, hand off control to a participant so the conference is not ended early.