Absolutely. One of the best parts of the Linux experience is the community helping each other in so many places on the internet.
EndeavourOS is terminal centric. If you try it out you might need to learn some new tricks, but its forums are fantastic and I rarely have issues with it. Cachy is supposed to be really good too.
I have never experienced ds4drv actually working. Maybe it is time for a distro hop if you’re feeling frisky. I highly recommend EndeavourOS as an entry level to Arch. I’m also curious about CachyOS and PikaOS.
Something like this just not working is usually what drove me on too a new distro until I found something that just works really well for me.
So yeah, this is the answer, or should be. I run EndeavourOS, an Arch based distro (btw) and I also installed ds4drv thinking I’d need it, and my dualshock4 wouldn’t connect. I deleted ds4drv, rebooted and tried again and viola, it connected immediately, with full support including rumble and touchpad. The drivers were in the kernel all along.
If FartSparkles is also correct about your old kernel after you sudo apt purge ds4drv, you can search instructions for how to upgrade to a newer kernel version, it isn’t very difficult to do.
Three years ago when I used Mint I had minimal issues, but it sounds like things have declined since then.
My path went something like Pop_OS>Mint>Fedora Workstation>Mint>MXLinux>Nobara>EndeavourOS>Fedora Workstation for a solid year>and back to endeavour with hyprland.
But that’s just the stuff I’ve installed and actually kept longer than a few days. I’ve installed silverblue, kinoite, openSUSE tumbleweed, bluefin, bazzite etc just to learn them, and honestly I just don’t see the use case for average users in atomic distros. Non atomic distros are entirely stable if you don’t do stupid things with them, and doing stupid things with them is a great learning experience.
Same old Linux differences in opinion.
Totally valid. I tried Mint with my father in law before and we had issues as well before I migrated him to Ubuntu which works wonderfully for him. I hadn’t used Mint myself in a couple years and figured the issues were hardware specific.
Using toolbox to force out of tree software to function is not nearly as simple going to the discover app and clicking “download”
Remember we’re talking about a kid. Not a power user. We’re talking about people that don’t know and don’t want to know what a kernel module is. Are those extra steps fine for you? Great, knock yourself out. They aren’t feasible for a child or grandmother who wants to just click shit and see it launch.
I use EndeavourOS without a desktop environment and install and configure Hyprland for myself. I enjoy those extra steps. Someone unfamiliar with my system wouldn’t even be able to open the web browser. That’s fine for me. I’m not going to suggest it for my 74 year old father in law. He uses Ubuntu.
Is it making sense yet?
Using literally anything that requires an out of tree kernel module, for one. Have some peripherals with features that aren’t supported by drivers already present in the kernel? Good luck getting any DKMS packages running on your machine.
I’m hearing a lot of very poor advice in here, at least from my perspective as a Linux user who’s been through the gamut of various distros over the years.
Fedora atomic desktops are not beginner distros. That is not their purpose, and their limitations make many things a person may eventually want to do with their machine a lot more complicated.
Debian? Are we joking here? Debian is an amazing distro for what its purposes are, but it’s not beginner friendly. Debian is bare bones.
Linux Mint is the easiest answer here. Ubuntu LTS (or its classroom based fork edubuntu) is another great answer. I know every Linux user on the internet recoils in horror at the mention of Ubuntu but it really is a drop in plug and play solution for kids and old people.
Big 2nd for Fedora. Fedora isn’t Debian stable but isn’t exactly unstable either, and I think having fresher packages in your main repo is worth it.