In the past I have used caldera, redhat, mandrake, mandriva and pop-os. More recently I am using fedora and ubuntu but debian testing is my main workhorse.
@jdownie likes immutable Fedora and ?Sway. The self hosted podcast loves NixOS. This is another immutable OS but I understand its state is declarative through configuration files (*.nix) perhaps giving it an ansible like feel.
Many experienced users recommend their arch linux. You build your own “flavour” from scratch but it is not for the faint hearted they say.
I have not decided on what to try next but I am leaning towards arch. Any suggestions and views on those oses.
I’ve got no direct experience with any of the options you’ve listed other than Arch. I’ve had a brief play with PopOS! which I was really impressed with from a “usability out of the box” standpoint and would happily recommend to anyone wanting to make their first leap into Linux. Big fan of everything just working, and huge thumbs up to the team for enabling full disk encryption by default.
I moved one machine over to Arch about 12 months ago, replacing the last remaining Windows install on the desk. This was my first experience with Arch. I had a brief look at NixOS after seeing it a bit on YouTube but decided on Arch as it seemed a better fit for a gaming machine (only used every few weeks) rather than a “daily driver” or other more specific homelab use case. On the rare occasions I get some downtime to game, I want to be able to push the power button and get going without having to do too much admin beyond initial configuration and occasional updates.
I used archinstall and followed the bouncing ball. After typing that at the command line, archinstall asked me all the questions to build a config file and then launched into the Arch install process using that config. The entire thing was really straightforward and everything worked out of the box. I vaguely recall screwing around a bit with the open source and non-free Nvidia drivers to try and squeeze a bit of extra performance out of the video card, but that was the only tinkering that I did during the entire install and setup process.
Games seem to run great (other than anything with kernel level anti-cheat, of course), and it’s not a big leap to go from pacman to apt. If you’re comfortable with Debian testing, you’ll have no issues with Arch at all.
I was also pretty promiscuous with my distributions in my younger years @zeeclor
I’m pretty reckless with my installations, and often find myself losing confidence in the integrity of the underlying operating system. With both Windows and Linux i tend to rebuild my machines after twelve months just to get a “new car smell” again. I think it’s basically because i just don’t believe that installing an application and then uninstalling that application returns the machine to it’s original state. I think they all generally leave some evidence of their existence on that machine, and over time that “residue” accumulates and contributes to overall instability.
So… i always admired implementations of linux like ChromeOS. It “just works”, and gives you a containerised Linux environment that you can nuke and re-install if you ever lose confidence in it. It also offers a nice powerwash feature that cleanly reinstalls the OS.
Anyway, now that i’m older and less adventurous, Fedora’s Atomic distributions are a little more my taste.
I recently installed Ubuntu alongside Windows on a machine with a good GPU in it. I want both operating systems to use that GPU. Windows for Steam, and Ubuntu for my efforts to catch up with others on this forum with their exploration of large language models.
I might have jumped the gun selecting Ubuntu though. Only last week i learned about something called Bazzite. From the little bit of reading that i’ve done, it seems to be a gaming focused Linux distro that is built on Fedora Atomic (in the “Download” section it explains that a “rebase” of Fedora Atomic will achieve the same thing as a bare metal install). I’m tempted to switch over to Bazzite and do my LLM learning on that. If that goes well, i might not even need Windows on that machine after all.
Haha, I’m very much of the same school of thought and used to regularly re-install Windows to clean out the leftovers. Had the process down to a fine art at one stage, but moved (back) to macOS based devices with the release of the Apple Silicon range in 2020 and have never looked back. Now days I tend to keep the base install of the Macs very clean, and run whatever cruft I need to run in a VM. In my opinion, Windows has gone off the rails over the last few years, and I don’t see that situation improving, so it’s wonderful to see lots of Linux alternatives catering for less technically inclined audiences!
ChromeOS and Chromebooks are brilliant for that. Out of curiosity, I bought a $250 Chromebook back in 2017/2018ish and it is still supported. I think it’s got 10 years OS support, and it still runs fine. It’s also one of the few machines that I could confidently say could take a huge whack and probably survive, as the build quality is amazing for the price. I was using it while travelling (until travel mysteriously and suddenly stopped in late March 2020 ) and it was perfect for most basic productivity type tasks. It’s back in a box somewhere now both because I don’t have a need for it, and I’m also on a bit of a mission to de-Google my life, but I will admit the concept and implementation was very well done for someone who wants to be in the Google ecosystem.
I’ve been curiously waiting to see whether Valve flesh out the desktop experience of SteamOS. Bazzite looks like an interesting alternative, and I’ll have to look further into the docs. I will confess I tend to sit on the fence with a lot of newer distributions and wait to see whether they turn into long-term and stable projects before getting too excited. Having said that, the stakes are fairly low for a gaming PC and I’m curious to see what your experience is if you go down the Bazzite route.
Over the last year or two the bit rot had set in on my laptop and so following these discussions I nuked the file system on the week-end.
I stuck with debian (as a true believer) and was not adventurous enough to install an immutable distro like vanilla or nitrux. I still have gnome installed but following a demo by @jdownie on Saturday at Humbug I have installed the sway tiling window manager. This is a simple process on debian.
Sway if a very customisable winman. In fact I found that without customisation it is unusable. There are probably a thousand ways to do it but I came across Jay LaCroix’s install as the first hit and got that working.
I am still working through various aspects of k*s (hi @techman) and ansible and with my new desktop environment I am now 50% as productive as previously. Yet I am hopeful, having seen James make it sing.
I am planning on getting a new NUC (with or without an eGPU) and might consider dual or triple booting that with debian, fedora immutable and maybe bazzite.
If you ask a LLM for some tips, you can “rebase” any Fedora Atomic distro to another variant. So, if you’ve installed Fedora Silverblue (their flagship Gnome spin) you can rebase to KDE, Sway, Budgie etc. I haven’t played with it much, but i’m assured that it’s like taking all of your personal crap out of your car and moving into a shiny new car.
In fact, that’s one of the things that raised my eyebrows when i read a bit about Bazzite. Apparently it’s based on Fedora Atomic, so there was a suggestion on the Downloads page that you could just rebase to Bazzite from Silverblue to take it for a whirl.
BTW, it took me a while to “get there” but i’m now trying hard to do most of my “work” in a Distrobox container instead of on the bare metal install. When you want to install something like dd for example (on Fedora Atomic) you’ll install if with rpm-ostree which will require a reboot before it’s available. Fedora Atomic promotes toolbox as the platform for these container environments, but lately i’ve been using distrobox with Ubuntu. It’s super fast and easu to apt install anything that i want in those containers and Ubuntu has a little bit more support.
So, i’m basically using Fedora Sway Atomic like i would Chrome OS. It’s a good solid foundation to boot into. When i want to do some work (and let’s be honest - probably break something) i’m in a container environment that i can easily re-install.
I love Sway, because i try to avoid the mouse as much as i can. There’s plenty to learn about living in an Immutable world without burdening yourself with an unfamiliar desktop environment like Sway @zeeclor . Silverblue is also a nice place to start if you’re finding Sway discouraging.
Do Nixos and silverblue work on older software? With Nixos the problem was getting stage 2 to boot.
For silverblue it was trying to install drivers for their broadcom wireless chip. I tried various overlays and other suggestions from perplexity but still failed.
I had hoped that the option to add third party repositories during the install process might have made the b43 drivers available but selecting that option just froze the wizard and required a reboot.
Fedora is the proving ground for CentOS and RHEL. The overall goal (to my way of thinking at least) is to decide which combination of newer packages won’t compromise stability. It’s trying to be “leading edge” instead of “bleeding edge” (i think).
The reason i’m pretty settled on Fedora is because i haven’t had any problems with the default drivers. I moved to Fedora from Proxmox when Proxmox gave me some trouble with it’s drivers for my particular NIC. It was probably a fixable problem, but i’m a little uneasy having to make modifications to a “brand new car” if you get my meaning.
That’s “stock Fedora” for my servers, but i like the Atomic alternative for my desktop/laptop environments. It’s just a bit more like ChromeOS, and i like the clear delineation between system and user files.
I had to ask ChatGPT before i could put into words the differences, so here goes…
Stock Fedora: Good solid foundation for RHEL, and traditional read/write filesystem. Easy to add other repos or make changes to kernel modules is driver support lets you down.**
Fedora Atomic**: Same good solid foundation, but locked down with a read-only filesystem. Containerised environments like toolbox or distrobox are safe sandboxes to do “real” work in (but all user space stuff, not system configuration, hardware stuff). Difficult to interfere with their standard build with other repos for example. NixOS: Kind of a hybrid between Stock Fedora and Fedora Atomic. The root filesystem isn’t read-only. You could make changes to the root filesystem, but a sudo nixos-rebuild switch might undo your changes. Ideally your changes would all be made in your configuration.nix, and you’d trust the build process to carry them out for you. This would ensure that a rebuild is reproducable. So, Fedora Atomic and NixOS kind of have the same philosophical goal, which is to leave the base system alone and do your work in a very isolated area. NixOS believes that this is achievable with a very extensible and flexible configuration environment (which is very ambitious in my opinion). Fedora (or RHEL really) thinks we should stay in our home folder and leave hardware/kernel stuff to their rigorous dev/test/build/release procedures.
I’ve put a lot of time into my scripts that make it easy to bring a fresh installation up to what i’m used to. I think the same thing is possible with NixOS, but i’d have to invest the same amount of effort into replicating a lot of what’s in those scripts into a configuration.nix.
So I gave up on silverblue since I could not install drivers for the wifi card on the base image. Apparently immutable means immutable.
I have since installed Fedora WS 42, got the wifi going and might run distrobox on top to get some of that ublue vibe. If nothing else I can use it as my “cooking computer”.
Like @Belfry I’ve been a long time debian/gnome user but thought it was time to branch out. He suggested I should select my distro to reflect my style. I am considering this but noted there are lots of others to choose from. I might go with Wolfi. It’s the distro you’re having when you’re not having a distro.
Yeah, in my early days with SilverBlue/Atomic, I railed against that a bit. I’d find answers to questions that involved adding repos; COPR keeps coming up with Fedora. Anyway, none of it seemed to go very far with rpm-ostree.
Eventually a light bulb went on for me and I realised why toolbox featured heavily in all of the getting started guides. I ended up with Distrobox because I figured that Ubuntu is actually more popular, so it makes more sense for my user space stuff.
I don’t have any exotic hardware, so I’m probably a unique case that Atomic makes sense for. I don’t know that it would have helped much for @techman ‘s dual GPU work recently.
) and it was perfect for most basic productivity type tasks. It’s back in a box somewhere now both because I don’t have a need for it, and I’m also on a bit of a mission to de-Google my life, but I will admit the concept and implementation was very well done for someone who wants to be in the Google ecosystem.