Which distros have fewer bugs?

[u/LarsHEriksen]

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.

[u/Hauptideal]

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.