this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Honest question(s) from someone who's been using Linux as a daily diver for well over a decade:
What distro were you using as a daily driver that encountered "catastrophic" system failures? What sort of use case? Was this recent?
If you really want to tinker, you can certainly break your system if you don't really know what you're doing. I'm sure I encountered that in my early days of playing around with home servers and whatnot; but I can honestly say that I haven't had this experience at all with my "daily driver". I've been running Fedora for a couple years now on my laptop; and everything just works. I run updates (at my leisure) once every week or two. I can't remember the last time something just "broke". I certainly can't remember the last time (if ever?) I had to "reinstall the OS" due to a catastrophic failure.
Not recent, so the details would be very cloudy, but I tend to favor Ubuntu, but it was most likely that.
What I did was set things up so that I could use it for my daily tasks : web browsing, remote desktop, video editing, and perhaps installed steam to see how games ran. In the last case, I was getting issues with memory leaks, so my RAM would constantly grow until the system became unresponsive and couldn't be used. This happened several times and I gave up.
In other cases (from what I can recall), I'll have some issue booting or the main desktop interface (whatever it's called) wouldn't load or needed to fall back to a very bare bone UI, and that was that. LOL
Other times, just installing something that required additional dependencies would give me issues, and then getting my graphics card to work required a tremendous amount of research and terminal use... I didn't have the patience for any of it, to be honest.
On Windows, I can tinker all day (but that's no longer my hobby as I just want things to work in my old age), but I only tried doing the basics on Linux, at least enough that my general needs were met without using Windows, and I just couldn't get it to work or be stable enough.
I may try other distros, but I tend to feel like the more popular ones are going to be more stable or offer more community support. Unless I'm totally wrong about that.