cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/27756512
(Apologies if the link doesn’t work; Google are dicks)
Funny how he praises immutable Arch + KDE and then uses Ubuntu (Snaps, broken packages, themed GNOME, not immutable)
I hope he finds his way to Bazzite, Aurora or plain Kinoite, as this would suit him way better
I’m thinking he might be happier with Noridian, ZephyrOS, Sylvanix, or AetherForge.
I myself have been trying neoNova, specTRAos, and VortexLinux and they’re all pretty good.
…
All of these are made up, I think, I just can’t cope with everybody and their dog still rolling their own distros (and alternatives to GNOME 3, thank goodness for KDE), even after 25 years of observing it happen over and over again.
Those are so legit sounding I didn’t even realise until the second part of your comment those weren’t real.
Granted, I just slap kubuntu on everything because I’m used to managing ubuntu servers and like kde, so my distro knowledge is limited, but still
Poorly, Kubuntu uses the broken Plasma 5.27 for a while until the next release afaik.
Really that was kind of the plasma guys fault, but Plasma 6.0.2 or so was really stable. Perfect LTS candidate. Then the new features came in, now it is stable again (on Fedora).
I used Kubuntu and the outdated Plasma and many packages were annoying. Nowadays snaps, and removed base packages.
Those are not individual random 3rd party distros.
Please read up on that stuff first. I understand how oldschool users find this odd.
- Fedora is the base distro. Legally restricted, not being able to preinstall crucial components. They also do a bunch of annoying opinionated decisions, like Fedora Flatpaks or Toolbx instead of Distrobox.
- Fedora Kinoite: the immutable image of Fedora + KDE Plasma. Very barebones, not really user friendly out of the box, but a great distro. As an advanced user I use it daily.
- uBlue Bazzite and Aurora: take Fedora Atomic desktops, make them compatible with NVIDIA, ASUS, Surface and more. Add a ton of packages, many call that bloat, but it makes stuff work out of the box.
(Btw. great Distro names :D)
Not all made up though. I’ve been following this one’s mailing list for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(operating_system)
He wasn’t praising immutable systems, arch, or KDE. He was praising a Linux OS maintained by Valve. Many people, especially those not familiar with Linux, simply want to use a distro made by Valve regardless of the technical details.
What? No. He
- Wanted to configure stuff in a GUI (i.e. KDE, OpenSUSE with YaST does also a ton but often duplicated and distro-specific) and avoid needing the terminal for everything. GNOME is extreme here, as the settings are so restricted.
- Wanted to be restricted in the ability to break his system. This is extreme on SteamOS, but just as stable on other systems like Fedoras Atomic Desktops
Those were pretty much literally the things he said
Good point about immutability and his comment about not wanting to break his system, i forgot about that when writing. But I disagree about Arch, snaps, those are technical details. Not sure which broken packages you’re talking about or why him using modified Gnome matters.
The Universal Blue distros are cool though, though I’ve only briefly used their lightly modified main image.
It’s all discovery takes a while to realise what you want from a distro. Fully agree the the ublue projects sounded exactly what they wanted
I’d been meaning to try out atomic distros. I’m not an expert on Linux by any means but I’ve been using it on-and-off for about 25 years, and exclusively (at home, at least) for about 7. So I’m a bit more than a noob.
I do worry if I’d feel restricted inside of an atomic distro. Might throw kininite on a laptop I’ve been meaning to give to my kid, tho.
So…
Concept of OSTree or image-based
In theory “immutable distros” are safer to use. Not easier, but setting up stuff is less hard than fixing a system that doesnt boot or upgrade.
I am only focussing on Fedora Atomic desktops, which use OSTree (which is a version control system like git, but for binaries) and in the future/currently in parallel bootable OCI containers.
Both technologies have the same purpose, that your system is an exact bit-by-bit clone of the upstream system.
Layering
Now the system needs to have support for modding, doesnt it? Android doesnt, ChromeOS doesnt, I think SteamOS also doesnt? But this is Desktop Linux!
While many distros use flawed and incomplete concepts, lacking an “escape path” (reset) back to normal (100% upstream with no changes) (for example OpenSUSE microOS, VanillaOS etc), all such distros allow you to change the system.
The disadvantage of image-based is, that you always base of the unchanged image and then add your changes. On every update, you pull down the changes, open that thing up, throw in your changes, pack it again. This takes time and wouldnt be sustainable for example when using a phone.
So you kinda need custom images like uBlue. The advantage here is, that all changes are done on a single system and all clients just clone that. Fedora for exmample has notorious issues with an understaffed rpmfusion team and problems in coordination, so you might get sync issues and a critical security update doesnt work because of a random other package conflict.
or you might get a regression, uBlue could centrally roll that back.
Apps
Tbh the biggest issue is with edge cases of Flatpaks, like portals.
I just now needed to create a signature containing an image in thunderbird. The solution is to copy that image to the internal ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.thunderbird/ container and paste the exact file path there, as portals are broken after app restart.
Then adding an HTML as signature, it needs to be saved in the same folder and also linked exactly.
These edge cases are issues. Let alone missing hardware key support, no filesystem sandboxing in Firefox Flatpak (and uBlue and Fedora people think that is fine) or outdated target systems, because Flatpak needs to work on Debian 11 e.g.
There are also apps on Flathub that are broken, like QGis, or missing apps like RStudio, both known FOSS alternatives to stuff that people really use, and I couldnt even run those without Distrobox, which is also not preinstalled on Fedora Atomic Desktops, and toolbx lacks basic features like separated homedirs.
Yup, it is a rough field. But the stability is worth it. Also, official Flatpaks are great.
