So far, Ubuntu 24.04 was an absolute nightmare for me. While upgrading to it in a VM, it randomly crashed, which broke the GUI. I had to go to the tty, and finish the upgrade that way to get back into GNOME. Then every time I launched its default file manager or its screen settings app (which became mandatory as it just randomly switched to 1280x800, thus making work a nightmare), it crashed so hard it took the VM host with itself.

Switching to VMWare, it was more stable, stable, but after the first restart, I get a lot of graphical glitches and a black background. Tried Kubuntu to see if it’s a GNOME-related thing, but similar issues prevail, this time with a tanked performance until I switch to tty.

I need an easy-to-use and relatively stable distro, for compiling, testing, and rewriting software with GUI, thus I cannot use WSL on Windows 10. I want to spend my time developing, and not resolving bugs, nor with tinkering with the OS. Likely I will have to keep my primary development platform as Windows, and Linux does not offer me anything more, and “deploying/cross compiling to Windows” is not very feasible to me at the moment due to I’m writing my own middleware to interface with OS API, and I also want to test on native Windows rather than in an emulator. Windows 11 might push me in the direction to use a Windows installation inside a VM, but only if disabling telemetry becomes impossible.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    71·
    5 months ago

    Debian is famed for it’s stabillity, it is also what Ubuntu is/was based on.

    Else, you could try Fedora or Rocky Linux

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    I’ve always used Virtualbox with various linux distros without issue. My go to is usually Linux Mint using XFCE - xfce is a lightweight desktop environment including whrj it comes to graphics requirements compared to Gnome and KDE. I use the Virtualbox Guest Additions to get good integration with my host system.

    It is also important to set up the guest machine properly so it runs well. I give it the max 128mb of video ram possible, 16gb syaten ram, 2 CPU cores to use (I have 6 on my PC), and a 50gb virtual hard drive at least. When setting up the distro I always install it to the virtual drive, and the first thing I do is install guest additions. I then run the machine at full screen on one of my two monitors.

    My advice would be use a popular distro with a low overhead Desktop Environment, as graphics will be the main bottleneck. Also try to avoid using Snap and Flatpak in the system as they are more resource - so no to Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I’d go for Xfce, LXde spins of various distros - Mint is honestly fine if you want an Ubuntu related system that’s easy to use and relatively stable. Otherwise Puppy linux is very lightweight and you can add just what you need. Debian would probably also be good to use forna truly stable environment.