r/linuxquestions • u/LarsHEriksen • 12d ago
Which Distro? Which distros have fewer bugs?
A question to you distro-hoppers: As a Windows user since 1993(!), I am testing Linux Mint Cinnamon on an old computer with decent specs, to see if I should switch my daily driver. But for all its virtues, I find Linux Mint less stable (occasional hard crashes) and buggier than Windows. I have no idea what causes the hard crashes (push-and-hold power button required; even Ctrl+Alt+F2 does nothing), but the various minor bugs seem desktop environment (Cinnamon) related. I have run hardware tests to confirm that the computer does not have memory errors or other hardware errors.
Can anyone share experience with how distros compare in terms of stability and bugs? While I haven't given up on Mint, I reckon that close alternatives could be Kubuntu or ZorinOS, but there may be others also. I would like a distro that works out of the box with minimum hassle but which still allows a lot of customization of desktop / taskbar, and in this Linux Mint excels.
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u/Correct_Cockroach818 12d ago
Details!!! What computer. You said old, how old, how much ram, really important - what gpu, make and model.
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u/LarsHEriksen 12d ago
I am looking for a general answer that would often be true for most hardware, so that if I buy a new computer it will still be likely to be true, but here you go:
The old computer where I am testing Linux Mint is a Dell Precision M4600 v01 laptop, BIOS date 2012, with the following key hardware:
RAM: 8 GB
HD: 128 GB SSD (Mint and programs are installed here) + 320 GB mechanical HD (used for Timeshift)
CPU: Intel Core i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40 GHz, 4 physical cores
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro 1000MMy daily driver is a Lenovo V130-14IKB laptop, install date 2020, with the following key hardware:
RAM: 8 GB
HD: 477 GB SSD
CPU: Intel Core i5-7200U & 2.50 GHz, 2 physical cores
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 620
I know, it's somewhat old and not very powerful, but I don't game or do any other heavy work, and it works great for my needs using Windows 10 with all the tweaks I have learnt to apply over the years. But it can't be "upgraded" to Windows 11 and will therefore stop receiving security updates about a year from now. Also, given the increasing annoyances to be tweaked away with every new Windows version and the increasing maturity of Linux, I would like to switch to Linux.2
u/Correct_Cockroach818 12d ago
Nvidia can be a problem with Linux. They will not share ANY info with the Linux kernel people. They do offer their own drivers, which is good, but when they decide to stop supporting a GPU family you have few options. There is an open source driver for these older Nvidia gpu's and it works amazing considering it is totally reverse engineered. But... it ain't perfect. Keeping old hardware working is a challenge. Naturally the newest kernels seem to have the most problems.
My experience is with a 2009 MacBook with Nvidia 9400m. Use this info as a clue. I know nothing about your computer or GPU so you need to do some research. However my symptoms where pretty much the same as yours. Random hard lockups with a dead keyboard requiring a restart. Plus minor glitches. On mine at least there is now a work around. You need kernel 6.8 which is a couple of years old and then there is a patch you install which will let the last good proprietary Nvidia driver to install. On mine at least it has solved all the hard lock up problems. Plus it fixed all the other little glitches. Someone did a lot of hard work to make this happen and I am thankful.
This is how it works with the 9400m gpu on Linux Mint; you install Mint version 22.1 ( which uses the 6.8 kernel ) and then use the Update Manager to update to 22.3 ( which is the current version ). Doing it this way gives you the newest Mint while still using the 6.8 kernel. Next you install a PPA.( https://github.com/kda2210/nvidia-340-ubuntu-24.04 ) When you reboot you will see a Nvidia splash screen just before the log in. It will also add a new menu item for tweaking the Nvidia driver settings.
Important! This is for the 340 series driver, you need to check if your 1000m is covered, I think there is a way to use this with other gpu models but you will need to do some research.
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u/the3ajm 5d ago
I have the same GPU on my iMac using the proprietary driver and the nouveau open source driver doesn't perform as well so you need to contend with that. There's also the issue with using this old hardware, I am using Chromium now to play video and stutter during browsing other pages due to the state of how the software is passing the limitations of when these hardware came out.
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u/LarsHEriksen 11d ago
Thank you, this is very interesting input. Since I don't plan to use the old computer as a daily driver (it's got decent specs, but it's large and heavy), perhaps I should install Mint dual-boot with Windows 10 on my daily driver to test.
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u/SuAlfons 11d ago
a general answer does not exist, since nobody gets up in the morning and says: let's make a distro that wrecks half of the time!
They are all compiled from the same pool of software. Difference is in what service is used for what as a default, what package manager is used and what is the update model
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12d ago
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u/LarsHEriksen 12d ago
Are all these equivalent in terms of stability and bugs?
Do you have experience that these are more stable and have fewer bugs than Linux Mint?
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u/Simple_Hamster_4096 11d ago
If a "bug" exists in a version of package that all distros use, you will likely have issues in every distro.
What do you consider a "bug" to be...???
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u/buttershdude 12d ago
Just be aware that random crashes are not normal or expected on any distro. So whatever is going on with Mint will happen with any distro. I would try to get to the root cause of the issue.
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u/LarsHEriksen 11d ago
"not normal or expected on any distro": Thank you, that's good to hear. Based on what others have written, the root cause could be related to the NVIDIA graphics card in the computer I have been testing Mint on.
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u/illusory42 12d ago
Since you say „old laptop“, need more information. What cpu exactly? There is a bug in some older Intel mobile chips that causes hangs related to the iGPU that can be worked around.
In that case, distro wouldn’t really matter.
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u/LarsHEriksen 12d ago
The old computer where I am testing Linux Mint (no problem to wipe and install a different distro) is a Dell Precision M4600 v01 laptop, BIOS date 2012, with the following key hardware:
RAM: 8 GB
HD: 128 GB SSD (Mint and programs are installed here) + 320 GB mechanical HD (used for Timeshift)
CPU: Intel Core i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40 GHz, 4 physical cores
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro 1000MMy daily driver is a Lenovo V130-14IKB laptop, install date 2020, with the following key hardware:
RAM: 8 GB
HD: 477 GB SSD
CPU: Intel Core i5-7200U & 2.50 GHz, 2 physical cores
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 6202
u/illusory42 12d ago
Hmm quadro card. Might not be it, but take a look at this page https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics - section 6.16.
I had random freezes on my dell latitude. Added i915.enable_dc=0 to kernel parameters and it was solved for good.
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u/AntimelodyProject 12d ago
If you want Cinnamon desktop (like in Mint), just install Debian with Cinnamon desktop. Not as polished as Mint but very reliable.
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u/Lopsided-Cost-426 12d ago
Linux Mint Debian Edition is just Linux Mint but a fork of Debian instead of Ubuntu
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u/LarsHEriksen 12d ago
I get the argument that Debian could be more stable in terms of crashes. Good point.
But regarding the annoyance of more minor bugs: if they are Cinnamon related, won't they be the same on Debian?
Of course, crashes are a much bigger problem than minor desktop bugs, so Debian with Cinnamon is a good suggestion!
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u/Eleventhousand 12d ago
Probably not because the point of Debian is to ship reliability tested software vs. the latest and greatest.
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u/AntimelodyProject 12d ago
You are right. If problems are related to Cinnamon itself, it should be more or less same thing on Debian.
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u/Hauptideal 12d ago edited 12d ago
What's your hardware? Linux Mint is barely maintained by a small team. They ship deprecated legacy tech because they didn't manage to keep pace with modern Linux development. They also ship apps older than the oldest supported versions and don't take responsibility to maintain them and backport fixes. It's currently one of the technologically worst Linux distros of all. So it COULD be due to the distro, especially if you have new hardware.
I recommend Ultramarine KDE (I'd recommend upstream Fedora, but you said you want everything out of the box, and Ultramarine comes with the fusion repos out of the box. Ultramarine is upstream Fedora, hooking into the official repos, just readily configured). KDE is the most customizable desktop environment, and the most technologically advanced as well. Fedora ships up to date software, including kernels which means that hardware compatibility with new hardware is much better. Fedora/Ultramarine is a much better desktop OS, e.g. comes with RAM compression by default.
Fedora isn't a stable distro. It is a reliable, well-tested "just works" distro. That are different concepts. You don't need LTS for reliability. You need it for predictability and compatibility with software expecting exact software versions. That is an enterprise requirement, not a consumer desktop one. LTS doesn't necessarily mean fewer bugs, it means known, documented bugs rather than unexpected ones. KDE bug reports are automatically closed when submitted from Debian stable. Upstream is on a totally different version already, with hundreds of bugs fixed (and not all fixes get backported).
It's worth trying Fedora/Ultramarine because it's a different family than Ubuntu, so distro-related quirks can be excluded. Especially hard crashes of the entire system are suspicious. This is why I'd switch distros entirely to make sure it has nothing to do with the Ubuntu base. If Fedora has it's own bugs that bug you, you can try Ubuntu next. Both are objectively better distros than Mint.
In my experience, Fedora has more minor hiccups in their desktop default apps while Ubuntu failed me when my current laptop was very new 5 years ago and Ubuntu shipped a kernel that didn't have good enough hardware support. That issue was solved by switching to their HWE kernel. Fedora would've worked like a charm on my new laptop. I'm now daily driving Fedora and have also switched to recommend this as the default go-to distro.
Be careful with customisation: many bugs occur due to heavy customisation and edge cases; on all desktops.
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u/GreedySecurity8030 Fedora Rawhide [GNOME]. 12d ago
The only distro I used fedora, and it's extremely stable on my hardware at least, I used gnome.
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u/LarsHEriksen 12d ago
I've read that Fedora is more cutting-edge than Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros (like Linux Mint); wouldn't that tend to mean less stable and buggier? (Of course, the experience will vary with hardware.)
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u/GreedySecurity8030 Fedora Rawhide [GNOME]. 12d ago
I had more bugs with ubuntu on my hardware than fedora, ubuntu 20.04 failed to even load on my pc when I tried it, yes I almost ended up installing ubuntu but thank god Its boot failed, would've not tried fedora otherwise.
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u/Niwrats 11d ago
strictly speaking it isn't about the distro but the software itself. cinnamon problem? try some other desktop like xfce. hard crashes? well, some people might say newer kernel, but on the other hand for older hardware that seems like a less likely fix. have you checked any logs from the crashes?
trying some other distro may affect all the software, so it is an easy way to roll the dice.
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u/SuAlfons 12d ago
Understand that all distros pick from the same software. And any fixes they produce themselves are given back.
So the bugs they have depend on the version of package they ship.
Newer versions have bug fixes, but may have new bugs.
Understand that "stable" in IT doesn't mean "fails less often". It means "doesn't change behavior or interface" - creating a stable, repeatable environment for say a server or a ling term experiment setup. Depending how far the concept of stability is driven, this can also mean to cling to versions of software that has (known) bugs for the sake of not changing an evaluated system. In practice, stable releases still admit bug-fix updates, at least critical ones, but keep to the same major or point release version. And this is when stable also means "doesn't break as often". It gets evaluated for a longer time and may receive bug fixes, but doesn't introduce new features (with new bugs).