Don't know if I should checkout SuSE but Ubuntu definitely doesn't cut it anymore IMO with serious regressions in power management on mainstream hardware (ryzen) and in overall usability ranging from no working kinetic scroll on the touchpad, over broken and minutes-late notifications, to gnome 3+ just overall being a bad fit and wasteful on notebooks with increasingly odd defaults on Ubuntu 22+. Unfortunately, kubuntu didn't cut it for me either; don't need gnome or kde apps anyway. Snaps suck, too, and their update mechanism is a serious regression compared to regular apt (always need to download everything, no control, etc). Maybe SuSE works better, but I thought SuSE has also turned to gnome after historically being a KDE-based distro? Never liked yast2; Debian/Ubuntu apt has always worked better for me.

Right now I'm back on a Mac after over ten years on Ubuntu.

Edit: reading through the comments I noticed Slackware 15 has been released back in February (SuSE was once based on SL). How in hell could've that not been a HN story?

> no working kinetic scroll on the touchpad

This is an issue with libinput. libinput unlike the old synaptics driver, has no kinetic scrolling built into it and applications are left to implement that themselves. The way the synaptics driver did it, a flicked scroll gesture on the touch pad would generate numerous scroll events. This had some advantages; it worked in every program that accepted scroll events at all, and it worked the same in all of them. The downside is that applications couldn't distinguish those kinetic scroll events from user generated scroll events. So if you held down the control button while a kinetic scroll was in progress, you may find that firefox suddenly zoomed the document you were viewing.

With libinput, kinetic scrolling is left entirely to the application. It should therefore work in firefox, but won't work in most other applications. And when it does work, it is often inconsistent because different applications that do implement their own kinetic scrolling don't all have it configured in the same way.

The devs say libinput is better because synaptics was too old, crufty, too configurable with too many edge cases to test... but from a user perspective I think synpatics was better.

> The devs say libinput is better because synaptics was too old, crufty, too configurable with too many edge cases to test... but from a user perspective I think synpatics was better.

That has been the user story on the linux desktop since forever.

Gnome 2 -> 3

Xorg -> Wayland

Alsa -> Pulseaudio

Synaptics -> libinput

Every single time, it's better for the developer and removing user functionality and making life on the linux desktop more horrifying.

Oh and gtk4 font rendering is broken for anyone who doesn't have a 300 DPI monitor. The current implementation of antialiasing causes blur. Can't even fix it by using a bitmap font as a replacement as they are no longer supported since the removal of FreeType.

Sometimes one can't help but wonder if Red Hat is paid to sabotage the linux desktop and keep the OS firmly in the camp of server side.

So much this.

Maybe we can add containers for desktop apps which no end user wanted ever but might be easier for packaging apps running on every distro - except there are now snaps and flatpacks so back to square one with .deb and .rpm ;)

Meanwhile there have been exactly zero new F/OSS desktop apps for over a decade except IDEs and even those are mostly Electron-based. What a mess.

Er, that's just objectively not true. Here's exactly one new FOSS desktop app: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion - I don't know how old it is, but it's a Matrix client and Matrix is only 8 years old so less than a decade.