I think your best bet for this is one of the spinoffs of enterprise Linux: fedora or openSUSE. both are very solid ootb, and have starting configurations that are generally good.
The microos or silverblue variants respectively are really promising as well, but still have some caveats.
Fedora is not an enterprise Linux spinoff, it is an upstream to an enterprise Linux distribution. Neither of those support proprietary video codecs and other potentially patent encumbered pieces out of the box, with some work for proprietary drivers too.
I’ve used both, and the only third party repo I’ve enabled was tailscale. I’ve not had any issue with needing codecs in anything I’ve Installed through the discover app. I’ll admit that I don’t have an Nvidia card, so I don’t know how good support is ootb there (though iirc, at least openSUSE has a separate installer that include Nvidia drivers)
You likely have and not noticed. Hardware rendering even with the Intel iGPU requires them. Just means things are not as performant or efficient as they could be, and more power usage, as your cpu is doing the rendering instead.
The patents have routinely caused headaches. For years (2017) neither one could play mp3s and only recently have they gotten support for proper subpixel rendering. The mp3 (and dvd) thing was a big reason people used Ubuntu instead for a long time.
I think your best bet for this is one of the spinoffs of enterprise Linux: fedora or openSUSE. both are very solid ootb, and have starting configurations that are generally good.
The microos or silverblue variants respectively are really promising as well, but still have some caveats.
Fedora is not an enterprise Linux spinoff, it is an upstream to an enterprise Linux distribution. Neither of those support proprietary video codecs and other potentially patent encumbered pieces out of the box, with some work for proprietary drivers too.
Is that so? I can remember a option on install to download proprietary stuff. I think that means codecs?
I am not saying that you are wrong just asking if you are sure.
That option is in Ubuntu and works as you expect it to.
Fedora has an option to enable third party repositories. Those are extremely limited.
Enabling all of rpmfusion or packman on opensuse is still work and even more work in the immutable distributions.
I’ve used both, and the only third party repo I’ve enabled was tailscale. I’ve not had any issue with needing codecs in anything I’ve Installed through the discover app. I’ll admit that I don’t have an Nvidia card, so I don’t know how good support is ootb there (though iirc, at least openSUSE has a separate installer that include Nvidia drivers)
You likely have and not noticed. Hardware rendering even with the Intel iGPU requires them. Just means things are not as performant or efficient as they could be, and more power usage, as your cpu is doing the rendering instead.
For example: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration#Configure_VA-API_Video_decoding_on_AMD (this references Firefox but applies to most video players)
The patents have routinely caused headaches. For years (2017) neither one could play mp3s and only recently have they gotten support for proper subpixel rendering. The mp3 (and dvd) thing was a big reason people used Ubuntu instead for a long time.
Sure, but in both cases it installs the flatpak version that distributes the codecs with the runtime.
Although, now that I say this, I did install the flathub repo on fedora, which does slightly undermine my point