I'm so frustrated rn.

I've been using Linux for 10y and never distro-hopped to solve a problem. Overall I've only used 3 distros as daily drivers. IMO you should look into making things work with a distro you like instead of looking for the perfect off the shelf distro.

Just gotta learn to fix stuff yourself. Highly unlikely for any distro to be perfect out of the box.

When I install Linux for friends and family the only distro I use anymore is Fedora. I have used just about every major distro, and Fedora is the only one that has "just worked" on every computer I have tried it on.

Love them, or hate them, Red Hat is by far the single biggest company in the Linux community, and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux is renowned for being stable, performant, and very well supported. Fedora is where most of the updates that make their way into RHEL are initially available, so with Fedora you get a cutting edge distro with the backing and resources of a massive corporation that employs many of the top Linux-desktop contributors.

If you want a distro that "just works" I strongly recommend you give Fedora a try.

OP, my request/suggestion would be the following:

In order for us to better help you consider the following:

• Inform us on your hardware specs. You could even rely on the software found on linux-hardware.org for a (so-called) probe.
• Inform us on which distros you've tried. If possible, for each one of them list the following:
  • What exactly didn't work?
  • Did you try any troubleshooting?

On a more general note, you shouldn't feel the need to switch distros even if other distros might offer more convenient solutions.

Moral of the story would be that there are a lot of different ways that enable one to overcome challenges like these. And unless you feel the need to go with a system that's (mostly) managed for you (à la uBlue)^[1], you will face issues every now and then. And the only way to deal with them would be to either setup^[2] (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper (or similar solutions) such that it automatically snapshots a working state that you might rollback to whenever something unfortunate befalls your system or to simply become ever so better equipped in troubleshooting them yourself.

1. But therefore demands from you to engage with the system in a specific (mostly unique) way.
2. Or rely on a distro that sets it up for you.

Linux requires putting in some work to get everything working, just how it is right now.

Pick a distro you like, and stick with solving the issues!

You will get tons of distro recommendations, so here is one more: OpenSUSE, then use the YAST GUI GTK application select Yast Printer it has a GUI tool for all kinds of printer setup options and will show recommended drivers based on printer type, it then installs them via that GUI. Not to be confused with the regular printer settings app you see in most distros.

do you people think Ubuntu will work for me?

Yes.

This is the kind of post that scares me away from trying Linux.

Linux mint I would say its the one that tends to have better support in a large amount of hardware and it was the first one that I was able to stick with

Install Ubuntu and be done. I'm able to print to my brother network printer with no special drivers. I installed a gnome tweaks package to do some minor tweaks in gnome, and I did rip out the Firefox snap thing to install Firefox from a package so I could use my kpxc plugin, but that's the only major change I made. Hell, Dell (laptop) even provides firmware updates via the package manager so your bios gets updated properly. Best Linux desktop experience I've ever had over the past 5 years and I've been daily driving Ubuntu since 2004.

There is not a single distro where everything works out of the box. I would be very surprised if even Windows or MacOS work exactly like you expect, the second you boot into them the first time.

I like Arch / EndeavourOS, but you will definitely need quiet some configuration for them. If you want more user-friendly or more up-to-date Debian, try Sparky Linux. It's honestly quite good. Instead of Ubuntu you might want to give Mint a try. Many fancy it as a more open and less corpo alternative.

Ubuntu itself is alright, but it's being criticised for pushing anti-consumer moves lately (i.e. forcing Snaps and telemetry onto them). Also, updates on Ubuntu are extremely slow in my experience. Maybe that has changed, but in some areas I doubt it.

The only reason you should ever distro hop is for fun

Linux is kinda like a 3d printer. You can end up tinkering and tuning more than printing.

2d printers are just cursed and have been since the dawn of mankind though. Go to https://openprinting.org/printers/ and see if your printer is in there and if it is which functionality header it is under. I'm assuming it isn't capable of driverless if debian didn't work and the other distro just happened to have something preinstalled. Unless debian doesn't handle driverless printing out of the box. I've only used debian headless for server stuff so I'm just making assumptions.

Arch maintainers recommend against aur helpers but for quite some time I just did exactly that and got the drivers for whatever jank ass printer I had at the time that way. Most of the official ones I have encountered are rpm and I hadn't used fedora or other rpm distros until recently, and the aur pkgbuilds would unpack the rpm and install the drivers the arch way. Incidentally, last I tried silverblue/ublue/kinoite etc can't install the brother printer rpms via rpm-ostree so having a driverless capable printer was lucky considering it was just randomly given to me by a friend that moved away.

If you share the printer model, someone here can probably also figure out what needs to be done without you having to go through a bunch of troubleshooting too.

Did you try Linux Mint Cinnamon? What about Linux Mint Debian Edition? They're improved versions of Ubuntu and Debian, respectively.

What printer are you trying to use and how is it connected to your machine?

Ubuntu will work, sticking to Ubuntu based system is good to have stuff just work. For Gnome UI just use Ubuntu, for KDE use Kubuntu.

If you don't like Ubuntu as a company you can always use these instead: PopOS for Gnome and KDE Neon for KDE. Both are very stable with great support. I've been running KDE Neon for years now.

Out of curiosity, what distros did you try?

For first time plug-n-play distros, I either go with Linux Mint or Fedora, for me they have the best results for just working.

And make sure when installing them, you always check to use proprietary drivers and codecs if it's an option, that will save you a bunch of trouble down the line.

I've found ubuntu distros to be pretty good for 'stuff just works". My daily driver is xubuntu. That said, I've never tried using a printer with it. Good luck OP.

Linux Mint is where I always go crawling back to. I have hopped so damn much. Mint sometimes needs a newer kernel installed, but I'll be damned if that Ubuntu base doesn't help with printers, graphics drivers, and scanners. Getting that to work on Arch was a blast and a half, on Mint I literally just turned my network printer on and it found it. IDK, you can do anything and there is always some issue eventually.

What do you want out of your system?

There are two more I'd reccomend as its what my family and friends have been using and have ran into literally, zero issues.

Linux mint (specifically cinnamon edition) is very stable, and customizable if you're into that sorta thing, you can install custom kernels and get greatly improved performance out of gaming if thats your thing. It's built off of Ubuntu (but just better) so there's great support for it, especially with devices such as printers.

Fedora Kinoite is a solid, also well supported, immutable distribution which will either make your life easier, or more difficult.

Immutable means you can't change anything in your root directory, so basically your "C: Drive". You still have a regular file system and can install all your apps, but the operating system stays the same as everyone else's and is something that by design, never breaks and "just works", and is what I personally use.

Pop_OS is definitely another option if you have "newer" hardware and Linux Mint doesn't work for you and you don't like the immutability of Fedora Kinoite (you can always try regular Fedora KDE). But I'd personally reccomend just the first two. But Pop is also built off of Ubuntu, so you still get that great hardware support.

But please, avoid stock Ubuntu. Ubuntu has far gone away from being a beginner, "just works" distro.

Hope this helped! Please reply or message me if you have any issues or are confused, or you can always ask for some more help within this community as well!

Ubuntu in my experience works best out of the box and has the best support reference online. Ubuntu works out of the box save for the webcam where Debian doesn't even boot on my MacBook.

What printer do you have?

If you're sticking with Deb based distros. Ubuntu Kubuntu - same as Ubuntu but kde Kde neon Pop_os

You might could try Manjaro. I have pretty good luck with it.

It's not Deb or apr. But it has the aur.

Good luck op!

BTW distro is the cure for this kind of anxiety.

Usually it takes me less then two weeks to get e.g. a printer to work. Your problem is not the distro but the hopping.

Yeah, Ubuntu works well for me. Ubuntu is operated by the Canonical corporation, which some people don't like. If you would prefer a community-run Ubuntu-like OS, Mint is just as good as Ubuntu. Fedora is also one of the best community-run distros that always just works, especially when running the Gnome desktop environment.

I will say that until last month when I upgraded to Ubuntu version 23.10 (technically Xubuntu), Ubuntu always just worked with all of my hardware. But for some reason this last upgrade broke my wake-from-suspend function. This is the first problem I have had with it in many, many years, so I might actually switch to Mint or Fedora myself. EDIT: I figured out that the problem was being caused by the power manager daemon, I worked around this problem by disabling display power management (dims the display if you don't use it for a while) in the Xfce settings manager, "Power Manager" panel, "Display" tab, switching the "Display power management" switch off.

Zorin OS is the way to go if you are sticking with the Debian/Ubuntu family. It's basically the Mac OS of Linux distributions, by shipping with a level of polish that other distributions don't deliver. To me this means I did zero tinkering out of the box to have the experience I wanted after spending a day configuring KDE in other distributions any time I did a reinstall. As far as printers go, they have always been hit or miss, but my problems were solved by disabling IPv6 on my local network.

Give Zorin a try. It's based on Ubuntu but even more user friendly - so much so that my elderly mother has no issues using it, she even prints and scans (a Brother MFD) and has no issues.

Archlinux has the best wiki and community for every type of issue.

I'm a recent Linux convert I started with Debian testing and that worked out of the box for everything except Nvidia drivers. I hopped from Debian testing over to Pop Os because Debian testing wasn't supported for a bunch of random things I wanted to use. I stopped using pop os a couple of weeks ago because it would crash all the time and was going to jump to Ubuntu just so pretty much everything would be supported. That flash drive install was corrupted so I ended up on nobara and have loved it with no issues so far.

Why is your printer not working?

Yes, there is always something that won't work. This often happens with Windows (not too often, but it happens), but most often with Macs. Linux is quite buggy in the userspace area, I usually find bugs or crashes within an hour of using any linux distro. The one with the FEWER bugs is definitely Debian. But it does that by not using hacks or beta drivers or software. This creates a rock solid architecture, but some hardware won't work (in my case, it was the sound chip for an intel J-series cpu that required a third party patch to work and recompile the kernel -- while Ubuntu ships with that patch by default, but ubuntu has way more other bugs all around).

So at the end, you will have to ask yourself if you want Linux because it's the right thing to do and use, or you just don't want to be bothered with ideology, and just use Windows and be done with it. I've asked myself that question and the answer is two fold: as a daily browser laptop, that doesn't depend on third party hardware, I just use my Macbook Air. It's a great laptop to have around in front of the TV, or traveling. For third party hardware dependency, and video editing, I use Windows with an nvidia card. For everything else, I use Linux. I have 8-9 computers, most run Linux. I create databases with it, I do some photo editing, financials etc.

Most operating systems mostly work find something that has a release cadence you like and is close to what you want then you will have to customize it to fit your needs

Why would you use Debian, it has the oldest packages and kernel of all distros. I would maybe run that on a server, but probably just use Ubuntu LTS instead.

For desktop you should try Pop OS. Really good distro from System 76.

Stay away from Ubuntu, it's very buggy for desktop. I tried it six months ago, fresh install, and the console app wouldn't even open on a fresh install. No error message, just didn't open. Great impression.....

Ubuntu actually worked for some people, who, for example, had trouble with PopOS! and getting highest refresh rate on multiple monitors. So yeah, if Ubuntu doesn't work, try Zorin OS, and if that doesn't work, try Manjaro, and if Manjaro doesn't work, there so many more to try out!