I mean, at least until last week, when I bought myself a new top-of-the-line laptop. I’ve been distro-hopping trying to find something that works and everything failed in its own annoying way. Part of it is because I stubbornly decided to stick to Wayland because I really wanted to use my laptop’s HDR display to the fullest.
Nobara KDE had serious issues handling hybrid GPU mode. The SDR color profile of my built-in display got completely borked - worked fine in HDR or plugged in to a display. But then I had serious graphical artifacts when I plugged in my display with VRR disabled! They went away when I enabled VRR, but the flickering was really bad. All of this went away if I switched my laptop to dGPU mode, but grub stopped showing anything and I couldn’t reach the UEFI anymore unless I removed the SSD.
Next I tried Garuda Dragonized Gaming. The styling is atrocious IMO, but I really liked the OS management tools. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to recognize the dGPU, so I moved on.
Next I tried Bazzite. I was very impressed by how well everything worked and performed! Atomic Linux made some of my regular setup more complicated, but the challenge was interesting. But then I decided to unplug it from my dock, and I discovered that the kernel was rebooting the built-in keyboard constantly, making it impossible to type anything.
I decided to go back to my go-to safe choice, Pop!_OS. Installation went smoothly as usual, I even followed a tutorial to use Btrfs which I really like. Everything worked great until I plugged in my monitor and the whole system started stuttering.
I decided to give up for now, I installed Windows again and applied Atlas OS to it to trim down the annoying stuff. After some tweaking I got the battery life to something that seems reasonable. Games work as expected, and I’m mostly done finding alternatives to some of my personal setup quirks.
I want to be clear: my switch to Windows is temporary until fixes for the issues I experienced start to surface. My laptop model is very recent, and I don’t have the know how or time to dig deeply into all of these issues. I’ll probably be sick of Windows in 6 months, ready for round 2.