Help me pick an alternative to Ubuntu

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kunta
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Kunta

Hello. some days ago, I moved from Windows 7 to Ubuntu.

At this point, I found Ubuntu to habe many, many unbearable bugs (details at the end), so I want to move to another distro.

-It should be a mainstream distro, so it haves wide support, and is easy to find solutions with google, tapping other users experience.
-It needs to be stable.
-Newbie friendly. Maybe Windows user friendly.
-I prefer doing anything with GUI, if possible, including mounting partitions.
-Needs to have a large amount of compatible installation packages. GUI for installation and removal is preferred.
-Should be easy to install, with GUI. But I want to control the partitions it uses (size of SWAP).


I had being eyeing these distros:

-Linux Mint- I discarded it because is based on Ubuntu, so I think that it carries or will carry Ubuntu bugs in the future.
-Fedora- A distribution with large user base, whose support will probably not dissapear.
-Debian- I suspect that may be hard for a newbie.


My PC is a i7 920 4 cores 8 threads, 6Gb of RAM, 250 GB SSD+ 1Tb HD, Gforce GTX 670 (2Gb). Important: uses an USB wireless network card to get Internet access, and I need to print via a network printed plugged to a windows PC.

EDIT: I tried the FAQ recommended test to pick a distro, but it recommends me Kubuntu, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu. And I do not trust these distros.
It also discourages me from picking Fedora because "it may require Linux knowledge". But says nothing about Debian.
That does not really helps me.



Some bugs I found on Ubuntu:
-Failed to install grub at installation time.
-Clock dissapears from the screen sometimes.
-Trouble installing Google Earth. It worked some days, and then stopped working and was impossible to fix. Probably related to a deprecated 32 bit library when running the 64 bit version. But I was not able to fix it with app-get as advised by many websites I googled.
-Frequently clicking on an icon of the bar does nothing. Other times it opens a new instance of the software, but other times switches to the application (as expected). Is not predictable. If many instances are open, sometimes does nothing, and sometimes lets me choose what instance to switch.
-Sometimes switching applications with alt+tab does not shows some applications running.
-Goes to sleep, even when I did anything I googled to stop it from sleeping (caffeine -launchpad.net/caffeine- doesn't works, acpi=off on grub does nothing, etc). I can't leave it uploading/downloading files at night. Many energy options are not available. (I read somewhere that may be caused by swap file being not larger than RAM installed. But Ubuntu installer choose the size of the swap file, so it is an Ubuntu bug)
-Had trouble detecting and installing a network printer shared by a windows PC. After many trials with exactly the same procedure, it worked.
-Sometimes uses a lot of CPU for no reason (Firefox may be the guilty. Not sure about that).
-Sometimes the screen blinks, and I see other application for microseconds lapse. May be caused by the official nvidia driver instead of the one installed by Ubuntu.
-Does haves no control for extra mouse buttons. First days after installation, extra mouse buttons worked as forward and backward buttons on Internet browsers (FFox and chrome). Today they do nothing, even when I made no modification to anything mouse related. I would prefer to use these buttons for copy and paste (ctrl+C and ctrl+v).
-Sometimes the wireless network stops working, and the only way to reconnect is rebooting. It worked far better than under windows, anyways.

I also miserably failed to mount a RAID0 made with Windows 7 (software windows raid. No bios/chipset support). But probably Ubuntu is not guilty. Just useless.

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