lancalot
I love both GNOME and automatic/dynamic tiling. So Regolith should have been a match made in heaven. However, unfortunately:
- It’s not found in the repositories of any major distro. You know it’s messed up if it’s not packaged as a nixpkg!
- If you can look surpass that, it’s still intended only on Debian/Ubuntu. While the AUR package exists (and even RebornOS -an Arch-derivative- offers it in their own repos), you’re simply out of luck outside of that. So, as a Fedora enjoyer myself, this unfortunately applies to me as well.
Best Distro
Needs dictate preferences. An objective assessment isn’t possible even on an individual level, as circumstances change over time. Linux Mint serves as a common starting point, with many users eventually ‘graduating’ to other distributions. The opposite is also true; many eventually return to low-maintenance distros like Linux Mint, preferring something that ‘just works’.
I’m very curious of which distro users loves the most that they have it on their daily hardware?
I daily drive secureblue.
Thanks for answering!
xubuntu
I’ve only started to use Linux after Snaps were introduced to Ubuntu. As the community has been pretty vocal in their disdain, I lost any inclinations to test out Ubuntu or any of its flavors from the get-go.
Though, I have used Zorin lite; which is Ubuntu LTS with Xfce by the Zorin OS team. Which is probably the closest I’ll get to Xubuntu. From what I recall, it was pretty neat. I did use the terminal, but it was more out of convention. Therefore I don’t really recognize myself in the following sentiment:
it still forces you to learn how to use it!
Would you mind elaborating?
Consider giving devices offered by NovaCustom a look.
When it comes to Linux-first laptop vendors, it’s definitely my favorite out of the bunch.
On purchasing one of their devices, they offer:
- 3 years of warranty
- 5 years of firmware update support
- 7 years of (guaranteed) spare parts availability
I’m simply unaware of any other (Linux-first) firm that can compete regarding the above.
And I haven’t even mentioned how vast their customization options are, or how well-praised their support is.
I’m actually stunned why it’s not mentioned more often in these conversations.
Btw, I’d actually recommend you to consider the whereabouts of the respective support centers before you buy a device. You never hope to be in that situation, but it makes a real difference when it matters. So, in case you’re unaware, AFAIK:
- NovaCustom; Netherlands. But as long as you’re in EU mainland, it should be good enough.
- Star Labs; UK. EU outside of Great Britain is OK.
- System76; USA.
- Tuxedo; Germany. Again, EU mainland is fine.
should I be looking at any other distros?
From what I can tell,
- containerization is appealing to you; almost all of them employ this to some degree, but some more than others. More on that later.
- your preference goes out to (closer to) stock experiences rather than opinionated ones
I take it that you’d rather stick to the (relatively-speaking) more popular options. Not that popularity is necessarily good, rather not used by anyone else is bad.
Then, the following are worth looking at as well:
- NixOS; it’s quite different to all the others, perhaps we may call it obtuse by comparison. But, it has been going at it for the longest; heck, it’s older than Ubuntu. And, in my humble opinion, is one of the main inspirations for the others. But, contrary to the likes of Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS, it doesn’t go all-in on OCI. Therefore, it might not be as smooth of a transition.
- Guix System; the answer to “What if we had FSF-compliant NixOS, but with actually good documentation?” Jokes aside, this is a cool and underrated distro.
- openSUSE Aeon; relatively new still, but perhaps already offers the most secure OOTB experience. However, from what I can tell, in terms of transition to OCI, it doesn’t strive to be very revolutionary (as of yet). Fedora Atomic seems to be a relatively significant (and IMO exciting) departure from traditional Fedora. By contrast, openSUSE Aeon seems more like a revolution with a (very) small r. Though, one may argue this is mostly due to maturity. Consider openSUSE Kalpa if you’re feeling particularly adventurous.
- uBlue’s base images; Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin are built from these. These are vanilla images with only hardware enablement, codecs, other RPM Fusion goodies and more that anyone installing Fedora Atomic would want on their systems anyways.
- Create your own; See this link if you know how to write containerfiles. See this link if you prefer yaml (.yml to be more precise) instead. The previous links were more focused on Fedora Atomic, this link offers Vanilla OS’ answer.
Other distros found on lists like this one didn’t make the cut for various reasons; sometimes it’s just because I haven’t heard enough of it.
Do I need to shift my expectations of an immutable distro even more?
Uhmm…, I don’t know exactly what your expectations are 😜.
FWIW, from what I gather, either (something based on) Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS should be right up your alley.
Initially, I was drawn to KDE Plasma for familiarity. Therefore, when installing Linux for the first time, I chose a distro with KDE Plasma. Which happened to be Fedora Kinoite 35, a very new distro at the time. It was clearly buggy and after fiddling with it for some time, I just had to rebase to Silverblue (and GNOME) for the lack of alternatives.
Thankfully, I actually happened to really like GNOME. This was on a laptop and GNOME’s touchpad gestures just felt very satisfying and intuitive; much better than anything else I had experienced before. Its (intended) workflow also made a lot of sense that way.
GNOME has really grown on me ever since. And while I’ve revisited KDE Plasma to see what I was supposedly missing out on, I simply stuck to GNOME as it felt cleaner and more elegant.
Still getting the hang of Ubuntu, but I see a lot of comments on different posts in which a majority of them point to using Mint instead.
Ubuntu should be okay; it’s not necessarily a bad pick. However, the community has been upset with some of its past decisions and (more recently) the implementation of its vision, i.e. their enforcement of Snaps. This has eventually led to our current situation in which it has become popular to hate on Ubuntu.
Would the best recommendation, be to switch to Mint from Ubuntu?
Personally, I’ve stopped recommending beginners to Ubuntu. This is primarily for how the above mentioned enforcement has lead to broken unintuitive interactions. However, if you’ve already started using it and are content with what you have, then the negative sentiment by itself shouldn’t warrant a switch.
Though, granted, (I think) most Linux users have indulged in distro hopping; some have even made it their hobbies. So you shouldn’t feel bad about switching either. Though I implore you to practice best practices while at it:
- Keep using your home base until you’re certain of the switch.
- Don’t nuke your home base to experience another distro. Make ample use of live USBs, VMs and dual booting instead.
- Try to understand the difference between the fundaments and the auxiliary when experiencing new distros; i.e., what is and isn’t possible for you to import to your home base without outright switching.
Honestly, in terms of ease to play, SteamOS (or clones like Bazzite) don’t do under fall short of Windows. Heck, I’d argue they might even be easier.
The real issue is anti-cheat. But that’s just the next hurdle we’ll have to overcome.
Edit: TIL that the expression “to do under” has no place in English.