I'm going to try to replace windows 10.

[InfiniteNoise]

I'm typing this from Ubuntu 16.10 on my XPS 15, which has been fairly smooth sailing other than a few issues with a USB Ethernet adapter, some odd headset muting bugs and a somewhat unresponsive trackpad. I've also had a few issues with the screen flickering on low brightness but I believe that's a known BIOS bug.

Out of interest, did you have to disable Secure Boot to get those distros installed? I had some problems with that. Seems like a bit of an anti-competitive feature to me

EDIT - Forgot to mention, it's really really fast!

The screen flickering on low brightness doesn't seem to be a BIOS issue, it happens on these models, I believe you can disable the 'flickering' on touch screen XPS 13/15 models but it can only be done when running Windows.

Yeah I had to disable Secure Boot, Fedora and openSUSE can be installed with it enabled I think.

 

[arty]

Good to know, thanks for replying. It's pretty solid otherwise although I'm not a massive fan of the WM (Gnome?) as it seems to be a bit fussy. I'm slowly setting up Arch on my desktop but it's a bit of an involved process, and I'm still at the CLI stage currently

 

[InfiniteNoise]

I ended up going back to Solus, got annoyed of dealing with ridiculous SELinux issues in Fedora, it was blocking iw and tlp for some reason, and because of it, I can't hibernate (it shuts down instead) and suspend can't lock the screen (because of SELinux denying it)

Tried some fixes, none worked, didn't want to disable SELinux, so I stopped bothering.

If it wasn't for these issues, I probably would have ended up trying out another distro, I distro hop way too much haha.

 

[Evil-I]

Very interesting thread!

My 2 pennies worth to the OP is that in my experience although I love linux and have run a home server on fedora for well over a decade (currently on Fedora 25 mate spin), I still struggle with using linux as my everyday desktop. It's the little niggles and things you need to fix that get irritating. I recently tried to attach my old epson scanner to my server and that was a case of lots of research and tweaking and eventually I just gave it up as a bad job and connected it to the wifes Windows 10 box and it was instantly recognised and working. This isn't inherently a Linux fault I'm sure, more the lack of decent linux support from hardware manufacturers, but ultimately was the desktop linux experience i got...

I also would struggle as I use the Adobe suite a lot and of course do a bit of gaming... Not Linux freindly.

 

[Cromulent]

I've never tried it but your experience of Manjaro is what I see everywhere. It seems to just be broken for most people.

Manjaro is great. I used to use Arch Linux which Manjaro is based on but it took about 2 days to get everything configured properly after a clean install. Manjaro just does everything for you and you get a working system in less than 30 minutes. I've got it installed on an ancient 32 bit Netbook and in a VMWare Workstation 12.5 Pro virtual machine which I use for programming and server management.

 

[InfiniteNoise]

Antergos is pretty nice, it's pretty much Arch with an installer and option of which DE you want to use.

Manjaro is Arch but with their own repo where packages are held back few days/weeks depending on if you're using development or stable version, also had issues with trying to install Manjaro on my XPS 13, it wouldn't boot from USB, so I had to use development version which comes with more recent kernel (seems like 4.4 in stable version is the issue), and when I try to install with encryption enabled, it fails every time (appears to be a problem with nvme SSD or how the installer is configured, can't tell), so I have to install it without encryption, which I don't like.

Anyways, went back to Arch after using Solus for a bit, Arch has everything I need, AUR is pretty cool and I have everything set up exactly the way I want them to, I should look into using a tiling WM and set up things, currently running XFCE + Arc theme + Terminal /w tmux /w Powerline.

 

[APM]

I started using Fedora around three years ago but recently tried Ubuntu and although it's definitely been a learning curve I'm glad I did it.

I find Ubuntu to be way more user friendly than Fedora and I've installed it on a few machines now both for myself and other people.

I still have a windows machine as my main PC but I can see a day where I'll be all Linux as being not too distant

 

[Grimley]

Mint user here for a couple of years now. On 18.1 Serena Mate 64 bit. It has its teething problems but I live with them. Installing & setting up takes up about half an hour if I get a problem & I have to reinstall.

 

[rexehuk]

I did the same as you last night, turned my coding laptop from W10 to Ubuntu desktop 16.04.

First boot I had freezes, and running GTX640m - I ran a few commands which seemed to fix it.

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia primus linux-headers-generic

All in all, was pretty impressed as it's auto detected my dell XPS pretty well - didn't go so well 5+ years ago!

 

[LabR@t]

I recommend https://kororaproject.org, it's based on fedora but with all the useful repositories. It's easy to install nvidia and amd drivers.

 

[APM]

What do people think about Ubuntu dropping Unity at the next upgrade?

 

[pete910]

What do people think about Ubuntu dropping Unity at the next upgrade?

naf all, Don't use it and don't intend too.

 

[APM]

I recently started using Ubuntu with the Unity front end and found it quite reasonable for a day to day machine.

After learning of the dropping Unity news I tried Kubuntu but I'm finding that a bit of a mess compared.

I'm hoping you'll be able to switch off or roll back any future updates that would involve disabling or removing the Unity front end though I can't see that happening really.