Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
Oof, yeah, that sounds painful. It does sound like some kind of hardware-related issue, maybe the default settings in the Fedora kernel are seriously aberrant when mixed with one or more of your hardware components? Given the broad range of issues (GPU, network speed, audio), I’d be inclined to suspect the problem was related somehow to something core/common like CPU or mobo. Almost certainly not a pure hardware fault, given the problems didn’t follow the hardware when you changed distros.
I totally get it. Doesn’t take much of that kind of frustration to leave a bad taste in your mouth. I had some perplexing intermittent lockup issues years ago that turned out to be BTRFS, or at least the issue went away when the VMs were rebuilt with a different root FS. I’m still leery of BTRFS, even though it was a fairly esoteric stack (SLES, ESX, NFS datastores served from a ZFS-backed storage server), so entirely possible the fault didn’t lie exclusively with the filesystem. But I still avoid it, just because I’ve been burned once.