I’ve been a linux server admin for almost 20 years but I’ve never been able to fully switch from Windows for my daily driver. With all the Windows 11 bullshit I want desperately to switch but I feel like I can’t win with a desktop distro. I’ve had nothing but issues related to hardware/drivers with each distro I’ve tried.

Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 43 has given me the most luck but it’s left me with one glaring issue which has me writing this post from Windows - how the fuck do I configure the OS to wake the monitors properly after going to sleep? If my monitors go black either from display sleep, OS sleep, or OS hibernation, the system can wake just fine but the displays show no detected input. I’ve tried both the open and proprietary nvidia drivers with no luck. I’ve also configured s2idle as the only sleep configuration and while it sometimes allows the monitors to wake without issue, it doesn’t always work.

Am I just missing something? Is there a different distro I should try? I’ve now been through Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop_os, Arch, and Kali with nothing fully working for my hardware.

Really feeling like I should just give up and give it another few years and try again - any advise otherwise? I’d really really like to abandon microslop.

MSI MS-7E16 (X670E Gaming Plus Wifi)
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super
64 GB DDR5
Latest Bios and firmware for everything; all software/os features up-to-date