To add, the most painful points for Windows users switching to Linux are IMHO to transfer data from apps they used. Importing a mail archive into Evolution or Thunderbird (without half of the emails missing).

Ok, thank you for all the replies and all the suggestions.

As a lot of you said, GNOME is maybe the best for me. I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed though in the past, and afaik it has GNOME, and it was really not as satisfying as Ubuntu. A lot of the menus are a little different, but not good different, more inconvenient different.

I tried Linux Mint in the past, too. It worked for the two days I had it installed, but I am really not looking for a Windows-like experience.

I didn’t try KDE yet, which a lot of you state is stable. Maybe I will look into it.

Now I want to explain a little why I did all this reinstalling and not just stuck with the first distro and fixed the keyboard language issue.

My intention was to test the out-of-the box experience with these installation wizards, as if it was for a first-time user. And my expectation was:

• Install wizard running through
• Install wizard shoving all the data to my NVME disk
• Install wizard setting up the boot process correctly so I don’t have to tinker and it just boots
• Login is working
• Preinstalled apps are working
• Software / App Center is working
• Basic Linux behavior like sudo and file permissions / mount points for hard disks are working

And, disappointingly, roughly half of the installations just didn’t fulfill these basic points. I just wanted the linux community to consider how the experience is for a new user that has the intention to switch from Windows and is not a Linux pro. They need a basic, working environment to learn. An entry point, so to say.

So maybe we could improve on this. Make it easy for them to stay, and afterwards they can learn the groovy stuff like hyprland, nixOS and whatnot.

It may look like I’m a quitter, but I wanted to try the different flavors. Yes, I didn’t read up, I only looked at the pictures of cachyOS install wizard and chose the good looking ones. There are install wizards for these flavors, so I expected that someone has tested them and that they work after restarting.

Maybe the expectation bar for the wizard was a little too high on my end.

I wrote another comment to explain why I tried these reinstallations and why I posted this.

Well, that’s the issue. I want to play games in Steam.

Not sure what to make of your issue with Ubuntu stopping from working, including the live boot, only for it to work again for you in the end. My hunch is wonky hardware but can’t really say.

That is the point that gives me sleepless nights. I just can’t grasp what was going wrong. If I stick the same USB into my PC right now and boot it, it will show the live session. No hardware was changed and no BIOS setting. My computer runs flawless now. Ubuntu is installed, no issues after a few days. So it can’t be the hardware, I don’t understand it.

My hardware setup is CPU: Ryzen 7 7800X3D × 16 GPU: Radeon RX 9070 XT To my knowledge, the AMD drivers should be on board in Linux, right?

That was probably the issue. I picked the desktop environments by which image I liked the most, in the cachyOS wizard. So I had no idea what I was starting. The quest in the start of hyprland is a cool way to introduce new people though.

Thanks, that also didn’t work, I tried. Only the recovery mode from GRUB.

I know I could have reinstalled it again. But my thought was, if the login is already causing so much pain I don’t want to invest more, only to find out there are 5 other points that don’t fit and reinstall after a day.

Ok, I’m glad I’m not the only one. It seems up to nearly 1 year is ok and afterwards it goes haywire. After my reinstallation I had no graphics issues any more.

It just happens that I tried to install a few of them the last 2 days.

1. Niri: Installation worked, but I don’t like that the task bar on top can’t be interacted with the mouse. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but it annoyed me. Pressing the Super Key did nothing, I expected to be able to select an app to launch. Frustrating. - Reinstalled again
2. i3: The installation took a whopping 2.5 hours. After the restart I was greeted with “login username: _” and no DE. Pressing CTRL+ALT+F1, F2, F3 didn’t change anything. So the installation was just broken. - Reinstalled again
3. Cosmic: Installation worked, the default cachy Software Center did not. “Cosmic Marketplace” or how it’s called, was an icon in the start bar, but the icon was empty and on mouseclick nothing happened. No program started. Always when I executed something that required admin rights, I just got an “Authentication failed” and was unable to type in the password field. - Reinstalled AGAIN!

That time with Ubuntu 25.10 and it worked, except selecting the default program for .txt files (I wanted to use Kate, but it throws an error)(“Find new application” > Error > Failed to execute child process “gnome-software” (no such file or directory)).

All in all, it’s nice to get an overview of what may be possible, but to test all of this is nearly impossible. I selected most installer options out of the box. Always chose disk encryption if possible. Over half of my installations in the last 2 days failed.