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.
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I used Kubuntu and the outdated Plasma and many packages were annoying.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.
I looked into distros using plasma 6 for a bit, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. It’s also a not trivial boot setup (dual boot with w11 and bitlocker + LUKS + secureboot) and the (k)ubuntu installer just handled it flawlessly (meaning not having to enter my bitlocker key on every boot)
Works fine for me (except some weird locale issue, but I knew that in advance)
CentOS Stream 10 will likely use Plasma 6. That will be great.
They always add features and in Fedora it is a bit breaky breaky again. After a few minor updates its fine again, and just getting better.
Just the icons are missing I think, then it would be a great LTS.
Kubuntu uses Calamares, which is a nice installer. But I managed to wipe a drive once! Because by default it loses the destination drive selection, I went back to check if everything was fine and it selected my main drive again, I continued without noticing. woops!
I used CentOS stream with Plasma 5 and there were a ton of bugs.
I myself reported over 200 plasma bugs and all recent ones were only fixed in 6. I am on Plasma 6 since half a year or so, so no idea what exactly that was, but a lot.
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.
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.
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.
So this is the issue when GNOME doesnt allow basic things, like editing desktop files in a guided way, showing package names etc.
Ubuntu has had broken packages for a lot of 3rd party software (when I last used it, a few years ago), for example SciDAVis which I used, and Libreoffice and more. Flatpak works without issues here. Beginners will not add Flatpak and have issues here.
I didnt say anything about Arch I think. He also doesnt care about that. Using Arch as base really just makes sense for Valve, as it is neutral, not legally restricted etc.
uBlue deals with the constant sync (and coordination) issues between Fedora and rpmfusion. When using Arch, this is not needed.
I hopped a ton. Mint, Manjaro, MX Linux, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE, Fedora Kinoite. Happy landing, and hopping was not fun, it simply was broken all the time.
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.
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.
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.
I’m saving your comment to name the next seven distros I make
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.
I looked into distros using plasma 6 for a bit, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. It’s also a not trivial boot setup (dual boot with w11 and bitlocker + LUKS + secureboot) and the (k)ubuntu installer just handled it flawlessly (meaning not having to enter my bitlocker key on every boot)
Works fine for me (except some weird locale issue, but I knew that in advance)
CentOS Stream 10 will likely use Plasma 6. That will be great.
They always add features and in Fedora it is a bit breaky breaky again. After a few minor updates its fine again, and just getting better.
Just the icons are missing I think, then it would be a great LTS.
Kubuntu uses Calamares, which is a nice installer. But I managed to wipe a drive once! Because by default it loses the destination drive selection, I went back to check if everything was fine and it selected my main drive again, I continued without noticing. woops!
What’s broken about it? I use Kubuntu and everything is working fine.
I used CentOS stream with Plasma 5 and there were a ton of bugs.
I myself reported over 200 plasma bugs and all recent ones were only fixed in 6. I am on Plasma 6 since half a year or so, so no idea what exactly that was, but a lot.
Also, Qt5 is EOL.
Ok, well “broken” sounded like, you know, that things don’t work.
Yup. They didnt, that is why I reported bugs.
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?f1=reporter&list_id=2716961&o1=equals&resolution=---&v1=%25user%25
Isn’t that a link to see your own bug reports?
They had us in the first half, not gonna lie
Yeah, I was like wow! In so far behind, there is so many new distros!
Those are not individual random 3rd party distros.
Please read up on that stuff first. I understand how oldschool users find this odd.
(Btw. great Distro names :D)
Zephyr is an actual operating system, but it’s not Linux
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
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.
GNOME has very little settings.
I actually gave Fedora Silverblue a try, documented here. This was not beginner friendly at all and still lacked many features in the end.
So this is the issue when GNOME doesnt allow basic things, like editing desktop files in a guided way, showing package names etc.
Ubuntu has had broken packages for a lot of 3rd party software (when I last used it, a few years ago), for example SciDAVis which I used, and Libreoffice and more. Flatpak works without issues here. Beginners will not add Flatpak and have issues here.
I didnt say anything about Arch I think. He also doesnt care about that. Using Arch as base really just makes sense for Valve, as it is neutral, not legally restricted etc.
uBlue deals with the constant sync (and coordination) issues between Fedora and rpmfusion. When using Arch, this is not needed.
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 hopped a ton. Mint, Manjaro, MX Linux, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE, Fedora Kinoite. Happy landing, and hopping was not fun, it simply was broken all the time.
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.