So, I recently switched my desktop to Kubuntu Linux and here’s a quick overview:

Initially, I installed Ubuntu latest and it starts up with Gnome and X11 which is a problem because I have high refresh monitors and X11 doesn’t support this.  So, I switched to KDE and Wayland which worked pretty well, but there were still issues so I went ahead and installed Kubuntu.

After Kubuntu installed and restarted, I was presented with a blank screen.  It turns out, since I have a RTX 5k series video card that I needed to manually update the drivers.  It is so easy to do this, but finding the command was annoying.  Google/Gemini was pointing me to the wrong location so I had to use ChatGPT to get the command.  After updating my video drivers, I was able to login to Wayland and all of my monitors worked and had high refresh rates / high resolutions by default.

Problem #2:  My Bluetooth mouse kept disconnecting after the system was idle for a bit.  It constantly happened and I had to re-pair it every time which is sooo annoying.  Once again, I used ChatGPT to isolate the cause (low-power mode, etc) and fix.  Ok, problem solved.

Problem #3:  Anytime my computer went to sleep, it wouldn’t wake up.  It’d just show a blank screen and I needed to restart it.  For starters, I turned off sleep which is fine but I would like my system to switch to low-power mode when idle.  Again, I had to use ChatGPT to get this working properly.  It turns out that there is more than one way to put the system to sleep.  I figured which one worked and then set it and now it works fine.

Problem #4:  I wanted to be able to RDP onto my Linux system so I could remotely perform work on it.  KDE has a remote desktop plugin called KRDP and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work properly when connecting from Windows.  However, it would work when connecting from a Mac.  Once again, ChatGPT to the rescue.  I had to switch to XRDP and perform some basic setup to get it working properly.  But now it works.

One thing that worked out of the box was Steam.  I am able to run all of my games on Linux and it’s great! Discord worked too.

Lately, microSlop has provided Linux (and Apple) with a huge opening.  System bugs and AI exploits have left the end user wanting more (or in many cases, less).  Linux is great; it uses ⅓ the RAM and ⅛ the drive space.  But, it needs to ‘just work’ for the average user.  The average user isn’t able to troubleshoot Bluetooth and Video driver issues.  Am I using the wrong flavor (I’m using the latest version of Kubuntu)?  I always thought Ubuntu was a good end-user oriented Linux distribution, I mean, many people have heard of Ubuntu.  But not having Wayland as the default X Server is a large detriment and furthermore, the issues I had using the latest GPU’s is just a bad situation.  It just needs to be a little bit more stable at the start.

I’m not saying these problems are easy to fix.  Being open source, there are disadvantages, like supporting HDMI 2.1.  But, it’s doable.  And after I fixed my issues, the user experience has been fantastic.  

Let me know which Linux flavor you use and if it contains these things working out of the box.  I was thinking of trying Bazzite, but I need more than just gaming.  I’ve always used a flavor based on Debian but I’m not against trying a different one.  I hear Fedora is really good.