If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-polished ootb experience that is trivial to install. Second to PopOS for a set it and forget it experience, OpenSUSE is a rock-solid distro that does not seem to get much praise.

Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

And guess what? It works in KUbuntu. But ubuntu is just SO slow now. ( And I couldn't install it of my current dual-boot anyway because it does NOT have option to NOT TO install new bootloader. :-/ I love Linux (lie).

That's not enough. Some package could eventually drag it back in.

    $ apt show firefox
    Package: firefox
    ...
    Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd

    $ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd
    Package: snapd
    Pin: release a=*
    Pin-Priority: -1
    $

Ubuntu had its place in popularising Linux but they jumped the shark a long time ago, now they are just another player jostling for their own niche.

And by server I mean that dusty NUC...

[0] https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images...

Ubuntu is just maddening.

Pop OS is nice out of the box too, but I just don't want to use Ubuntu derivatives at this point even if they've removed snaps

Ironically I was about to set up a new Linux Dev machine with Ubuntu and now I'm more inclined to go back to Mint since I never had a bad experience with it. I was fortunate to skip the Gnome 3 days and the Cinnamon and Xfce implementations have been very stable for a while now.

I've given-up on Debian-like systems on a laptop, because the drivers were never good, just decide one last try with bare Debian, and have everything work out of the box. In my experience, Ubuntu never works, and when you suddenly get most things to work, they break down again in a week or two.

No other distro ever gave me that experience.

I personally have had them ship out WIP patches not meant for production, which has wasted a lot of my (volunteer) time chasing down phantom bugs in software I maintain. This has personally happened to me on at least four different occasions. A lot of other FOSS maintainers I know have similar stories.

More info: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

Is Manjaro really that noob-friendly? All I know about Manjaro is that it's based on Arch, which I always understood as being the LEAST noob-friendly distro besides LFS.

Now it's just adware and unstable crap, not near as bad as Ubuntu but I won't recommend Manjaro anymore.

There are several less noob friendly distributions than Arch, I'd say NixOS, Void and Alpine probably top that list. Theyre great distros but they deviate significantly from what you'd expect from mainstream Linux.

(I ask with actual curiosity; I'm ignorant to most distros.)

[1] https://linuxmint.com/rel_vera_cinnamon_whatsnew.php

But whenever I see someone running Ubuntu on a server I think that there is a very real competence issue. Ubuntu should be kept as far from the server room, data centre or cloud as possible.

  sudo tee <<EOF /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox-no-snap >/dev/null
  Package: firefox*
  Pin: release o=Ubuntu*
  Pin-Priority: -1
  EOF

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install firefox

Alternately, I could shill for NixOS. It's also really nice. Eventually.

Honestly, I prefer NixOS. It's far more configurable, which is a nice thing to have in an immutable OS.

I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is a steep learning curve), though their community is top notch, and everything I do is deb based.

Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu) or just go all out and switch to something Arch based like EndeavourOS.

Not exactly sure what you mean by modern, but I'd recommend debian "unstable" (also called "sid"). Despite its name it's pretty stable. Normal debian stable releases are LTS style, unstable is where newly built packages show up first—so it will generally have the latest version of stuff and not be stuck a year or 2 back. It's basically a rolling-release style thing—I put in a little cron-job that does `aptitude safe-upgrade -y` every night to keep me up-to-date.

You can also use debian "testing", which one step back from "unstable"—packages are promoted from "unstable" to "testing" when if they've gone 2 weeks without a bug report of some particular severity (that I can't remember off the top of my head).

What's nice is you can have both testing and unstable in your apt sources—on my machine I set the priority on my testing higher than unstable so I generally get the testing packages, but I can grab unstable if I need to. I've been running this way for about 20 years now, and it seems the right balance of new but consistent.

I don't want things breaking left, right and centre but I want access to later versions of tools and libraries I'm using.

For example, at work we were told to upgrade Wireshark and VirtualBox to major versions that aren't available in apt on 22.04 after an audit due to vulnerabilities in older versions.

What you're doing sounds like it'll work nicely for me, thanks.

Key differences I noticed:

- apt vs dnf

- Intalling on a new computer.

Would totally recommend.

Still undecided though; I'm too old (read; jaded) for distro hopping now, but maybe I'll try find a Debian setup as another commenter suggested that'll work.

I've had Fedora for over five years and I've never had my laptop get completely borked by an upgrade, but I've had just enough things break between releases in the past that I still get get the sweats every time I've gotta do the restart upgrade, whether it will come up completely and just work or whether my WiFi is now broken because resolve-d changed to systemd-resolved.

Key benefits: - Applications through flatpak don't depend explicitly on system libs so there's less chance of breakage. - If upgrading to new fedora version breaks anything, switching back is just one command away (rpm-ostree rollback). I don't think going back is so easy on normal fedora.

I really enjoyed the results of NixOS with flakes but a couple of things were a little more challenging than I have time for to switch it into my daily driver.

It was that steep curve that stopped me going back to date; I liked everything about it, the community was very welcoming and helpful, the declarative nature, and ability to define my machines' states in Git, the documentation, no complaints except the time I'd need to feel as proficient as I am elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Mozilla still maintains ppa (mozillateam) with apt version. There's also Flatpak version, which delivers what snap promised.

Here's how to properly install firefox on ubuntu

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d...

and, once you're done:

   apt-get purge snapd

1: https://fostips.com/ubuntu-21-10-two-firefox-remove-snap/