In the installer even!

It's wilder when it works in the installer, but not on first boot.

I have altered the drivers, pray I do not alter them further.
Ah yes, the 'Arch Linux' experience. To be fair, your machine boots really really fast when you don't read the install guide carefully enough and fail to put a network stack on. Valuable learning opportunity.
- I have yet to be brave enough to try. I'm not sure my ego can handle how bad I'll fuck it up.
The amount of times I've pulled the trigger only to have to delve into forms and git repos trying to find a driver.

So, are you trying to say it's the year of the Linux desktop?

- Lemme have a seizure real quick

I get suspicious when everything just works on a laptop.

I never had anything NOT work on a laptop. I installed Linux on 5 of them.
- These days, that's pleasantly true :)
  15 years ago was a different story. You'd have about a 50/50 shot of your trackpad working, one in three that your WiFi would work, and if you were hoping for a working webcam, you should just forget about it.
  So even in modern times when you do an install and everything mostly just works, it still feels suspiciously miraculous.

Regarding the title,

If you've enough distros then you must've encountered the scenario where the driver worked in installer but did not in the final installation

Lol yea, I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that, but at least then it was usually a "Why didn't you just install it‽" rather than a 6 hour marathon of patches and drivers compiled from source or some shit LMAO
I literally ran into this last night trying to install Cachyos on my old surface. I was relieved when the wireless worked in the installer and so incredibly confused when it doesn't now... I'm still trying to fix it lol.

Yup. Big fan of [distro]. Never had a problem running [distro]. I CHOOSE to open [distro]'s terminal because its so perfect i don't ever NEED to.

I run Ironman btw.

Fuck [distro] and its fanboys. [Distro 2] is clearly superior.
- Fuck [distro], fuck [distro 2], you plebians haven't breathed until you've rolled your own Linux From Scratch
  /j

I have a kink for installing Linux on Macs. The only thing I ever have trouble with is wifi, particularly on my 2011 MacBook Pro.

Oh, and the trackpad gets significantly shitter, but that's just life.

I installed endeavouros on my 2015 pro and nothing made the WiFi work. Reinstalled macOS.
After a few days I thought screw it, I’ll try other distros. Popos just boots and works out of the box ….
- I kinda wish I hadn't sold my 2015 MBP Pro when I got my M2 Air. I wasn't messing about with Linux then, but with hindsight it would have been an excellent machine. I had it running Ventura (I think it was) via OCLP, which was great, but the fans were basically constant. Turns out that it was likely just macOS/OCLP.
  Currently running Kubuntu off a thumb drive plugged into my 2011 MBP and I honestly don't think I've heard the fan on it. Running Ventura on the same machine was like trying to work next to a jet engine.

This is what I think is holding back Linux adoption for end user devices. Only a handful of hardware suppliers cater for Linux directly, the rest are supported by the Linux community developing drivers where needed which will always be a cat and mouse situation.

I believe as adoption rate begins to intensify, hardware companies will take more notice and Linux adoption will increase exponentially. I think we are already beginning to see this starting.

This isn't only an issue with Linux, it's an issue within the whole technology industry. Simple things like Wi-Fi cards and the like, should be all standardized.
Hardware shouldn't be catered to any particular os.
- That would be great, but then you'd also need to standardise driver api's across all operating systems for it to be seamless.

Sheeeeeeeeit. I remember when that wasn’t even the case with Windows. I’m old, though.

That's still not the case with windows for me. The headphone jack doesn't work. I did go as far as to reinstall OS from scratch.
It's not uninstalled drivers because they work for thr first 5 minutes after boot.
Getting sound to work is easier in linux than in windows for my pc. That's just uncanny to think about.
- My wifi does not work out of the box with the windows installer, for some reason, so I have to use my phone as a hotspot. Never happened on the linux distros I tried :>
Try installing Windows on some Dell computers without the storage drivers...
- All you have to do is switch the storage to AHCI mode in BIOS. Windows has to have a special driver for it too in RAID mode, at least as of last time I tried to install it on a dell.

See, this is why I like Linux Mint. I've gotten lazy in my old age and just want things to function.

painfull memories. mouse worked in instaler but not once installed. always something

For me it's the geolocation of all things. Live USB can find my location in map and weather applications no problem but once installed it only gets my country right...
I had an old laptop where graphics worked in the LiveCD installer but not once installed.
Tldr it took a bunch of bootloader config changes to make it work again

So Linux Mint then!

I'm actually having a better time of it after switching to Bazzite. I had a bunch of strange little issues on Mint that seem to be gone after switching. I switched as a hail Mary for an issue where 3D Games would freeze randomly, and that seems to be gone too thankfully
- also, your system is immutable now, so
  you CAN'T break it

Must be a thinkpad lol

Dell surprisingly lmao
- As far as I know DELLs are decent, especially latitudes.

I am not a techy person. But I started using Linux in around 2007ish (might have been a little earlier). First started because of philosophical issues with open source mentality.

I bled for that philosophy, let me tell you. Nothing worked out of the box, my only friend who used Linux was an online friend, and his tech support could only help me if we happened to be online at the same time. He helped a lot, but dozens and dozens of guides later I managed to get it mostly working. Google.com/Linux used to be a thing, and it was quite helpful. After a few reversions back to Windows in the early days I got a terrible little netbook, and Wubi became a thing. It allowed you to install windows from within windows, without having to have a live CD. It worked great, but it was right back to all the same touchpad, wifi, monitor, et cetera issues. But this time I could go back to Windows and research my issue, print off the guides, and use them to troubleshoot. So much easier than asking my neighbor to use their computer, or trying to read and follow the guides from my blackberry lmao

Now? I haven't a had a single issue like that when installing a distro in 10+ years. Shit just works now. Granted, I stick to mainstream distros, or forks of mainstream distros. Craziest thing I've tried recently was Bazzite, which is basically just silver blue. I liked being on Bazzite and silver blue, but I ended up going back to regular old fedora workstation, because relying solely on flatpaks is limiting, and I (remember, not a techy person) don't understand rpm ostree lol

I bought a media center pc around 2000 and installed Ubuntu. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was sound through HDMI. Figured it out the same day.

I have barely had any of those issues in almost 20 years of linux use. The worst I remember dealibg with was cups back in the day. Certainly almost everything I've installed linux on in the last 10 years has just worked.

The only exception has been installing linux on old chrome books.

It used to be pretty bad before hardware standardization.

This was my experience with Ubuntu, my beloved. :)

Ubuntu catches some well earned flak, but afaik it was the first distro to have an effortless Gui setup wizard that "just worked."
I remember using one of their ubiquitous install CD back in the mid 00s to bring an old laptop back to life, and literally changing my life.
- If it weren't for Ubuntu, I'd wager half or more Linux users wouldn't be Linux users. I have no hard data to back this up and I'm willing to be told I'm wrong. But most of the stories I hear are "started on Ubuntu back when they were mailing out free CDs" and "tried a few other things, gave up until I found Ubuntu"
  It's barrier to entry was so long for Windows users, and it allowed people the time and space to get comfortable with being on something not-windows, and sure, eventually a big chunk moved on, but it got them to this side of the fence, and that's admirable. Wubi (a dual boot installer you could run from within windows without a CD a thumb drive) is what really got me on Linux, and eventually I stopped dualbooting altogether.
- I keep reading this, but why?
  Edit: The flak

I have had an insane number of issues on my AMD card (not even old, an RX 6600 XT). Every new kernel version, ROCm version, there's some new bug/crash that happens. Currently, the LTS kernel is the only stable one for me.

A list of issues I've had:

Random page faults in OpenGL if I dare use more than 10% of it
An insane separation of the audio and video driver on the GPU that causes neither to be usable, one stuck in limbo, unable to be bound to any device.
Segmentation fault when doing anything in ROCm (I've had to revert to a very specific month old version)
Page fault with VAAPI if I have both a vulkan and opengl app running
Absolute lag insanity if I use SPECIFICALLY 92-95% of my vram, anything else is fine. I swear it's not a vram issue.
Glitchy artifacts frequently on the screen reminiscent of a VRAM issue (newest issue that made me revert to month old kernel versions)

I'm still gonna be using Linux, but I've never had issues like these in windows (where amd is famous for *bad" drivers).

That's wild. I have the exact same card and didnt encounter a single problem with it. I am currently running a dual monitor setup with different resolutions and refreshing rates and it just works. Sometimes some people are just kind of cursed with their setup.
Linux can only do 1080p resolution haha

Is this some sort of Ubuntu joke I'm too Arch to understand?

Right? Arch detects all my hardware. Its my favorite Gentoo install medium.

Funnily enough, me with Alpine Linux

I threw it at my laptop and it just worked without a hitch

Debian 13.

Tried open suse, but on my laptop it was slow and loud and the battery would die almost instantly (had to make it hibernate rather than suspend if I wanted it to make it through the night).

Installed Debian 13 and it feels like a new laptop. Not sure what exactly made the difference between the two but I'm not complaining...

If anything, Windows 11 is the OS where things don't work off of a fresh install (assuming it's a self-built PC). It requires an internet connection during regular setup yet the ethernet/wifi drivers simply didn't work. I had to cheat startup and install drivers through USB.

Bazzite on the other hand, worked instantly. The only thing needed was to set the right sound output.

First time I installed Linux was maybe two years ago, and I watched a video that basically told me it's best to start with something simple and install things as you need them, so I got plain ol Ubuntu.
Well it turns out it's really hard to get basic shit working when basic shit doesn't work. I was having some crazy dual monitor problems.
I've tried Pop and Endeavor now and I'm much happier.

Fedora originally did this... and then has slowly broken along the way and I'm getting too tired to fix it. First it was Bluetooth back around February due to kernel issues, then it was my trackpad a few weeks ago (can't remember what's causing it) so I have to use USB mouse now, and now I've realized that there's no audio when I record with my camera, but I'm not sure how to troubleshoot it to figure out what drivers I'm missing.

The camera could've been broken for a while tbh, I haven't had to use it since early spring when I had a Zoom class. But since my Bluetooth broke back then I usually switched to Windows to do my Zooms...

I threw together spare computer parts and a new hard drive, installed Bazzite, Steam, and did an entire Dark Souls 1 playthrough without issue using an xbox controller.

Waiting for things to go awry now. Kinda feels like an Ambrose Bierce story playing out.

It was kinda funny, when I installed fedora a few months ago, the wired ethernet port wasn't working at first (needed an update, probably because my mobo was pretty new) but the wifi worked right away. Not sure what I would have done if neither of them worked tbh.

Endeavour

I had this experience with my l14 thinkpad and Fedora.

I was shocked that even the fingerprint reader worked… well like half the time, but I don’t like using it anyway.

The only "real" computer (that is, a non-SBC one) I've installed Linux lately on was a work laptop. Touchpad, GPU and Wi-Fi worked straight off in Debian. Though I think it only installed Nouveau, never bothered with the real Nvidia driver. And it had some weird thermal regulation issues. Once it somehow left the filesystem in "plz boot in single user and fsck with a toothpick" state. The day before my internship ended, the thing crashed hard for some reason and took the filesystem with it. (Never use btrfs I guess?)

impossible! jkjk

It's like magic.