Reading PKGBUILD won’t save you if you don’t read the code or if the PKGBUILD installs a prebuilt bin. Same as Slackbuild or a third-party APT repository: you need to understand what a supply-chain attack is and do your duly work to prevent it, or stick with the consequences.
My case: I have an nvidia GTX 980. It’s old but it’s what I have.
Nvidia dropped its support from driver version 595.
Driver 580 is what I need, it worked until 7.0 but no longer in 7.1 (was using Fedora 44). Since my hardware is old I switched to Debian Trixie.
Another example is the facetime HD Webcam of macbook pro: to make it work you have to install OSx or download a recovery image, compile a C program to extract a specific binary blob, then use that blob to recompile the driver on your kernel.
There are lots of examples: it’s a big world, with lots of hardware and mostly no producer interested in the Linux world.
Broadcom hardware (WiFi cards an webcams in particular). Plus there are quirks with some proprietary driver version not building against some kernel version…
With unsupported hardware and closed drivers you are always on the lookout for some breakage.
And it’s not a Linux problem nor a complaint on distro maintainers. It’s manufacturers that are shit.
Unfortunately this is the beauty and the bane of choice and freedom: everyone has it’s own opinion of what is good and what is not, and can easily make it so, fragmenting the offer and confusing the newbie losing it to the less free alternative. Works in Linux, works in politics.
There is no way to have freedom of choice AND a united front against the alternative.
I tried GrapheneOS last Sunday and cannot male whatsapp work. Tried the play store, the aurora, github, official website, nothing worked, the authentication always failed. Unfortunately my whole social life and family are there, so for me it’s a no go for now.
Yes: it was the only way to update the software inside. It was so old some pages refused to load, and was really slow. It was a painless and quick procedure and it has been working better than ever since then: decent hardware with (now) very good software.
On my 2014 PC I’m using Fedora 44 with KDE, which defaults to Wayland: not problems whatsoever, but some applications say “Wayland support is experimental, beware”.
I switched to X11 after a suggestion to debug some issues with a game. The issues was not fixed, all the other applications I’ve tried are still working flawlessly. PLUS the KDE night light feature is working (was not in Wayland). So I stayed with X11.
On my wife MacBook (2015) I installed Kinoite, defaults to Wayland. Everything works, but Rustdesk renders VERY small. I have not tried X11 on that, and will not try it.
Try both with all your applications and setups and choose the smoother experience. Make security a secondary priority: if it was the first you have less attack surface sticking to terminal only.
I literally installed it 5 days ago on my 14 yo PC: Fedora was too much ahead for my hardware, Slackware had some incompatibilities with it, Debian was crawling slow.
Gentoo is really good: took a day to install it because I needed to learn how to use lvm with initramfs on uefi and some other small things. Not much recompiling thanks to binary repository.
And its blazing fast, my PC is flying like its 2014 again!
Today I have to recompile qtwebengine because I need digikam, and this will take time I guess. But for now I think its worth it.