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.
I’ve set up several VMs in VirtualBox with Mint and never had any issues. Might be worth a try.