Practice in a VM and see for yourself! I did that, set everything up, and ultimately decided it was more system admin detail than I wanted to take on. But as far as ease goes, it’s not especially hard, there’s just not much in the way of hand-holding or preset configs, and you’ll likely find there’s a lot of preinstalled drivers and things you take for granted.

Bluefin is essentially Aurora with Gnome, and Bazzite has a Gnome version, so if that’s more your cup of tea, it’s out there!

Tried Aurora in a VM, and while it ran like shit (probably a VM issue, not Aurora’s), I was shocked that it reported updates, and by the next boot, it had already updated everything.

I run Bazzite on a laptop, so they’re similar, but Aurora really felt clean, polished, and ready for general use.

Weird. I would be interested to know what actually happened, but I am not smart enough to troubleshoot hardware to that degree! At least you found something that works.

TBH, Red Hat focusing their attention on business isn’t that problematic for me. RHEL is specifically for businesses, and Red Hat needs to make money to keep operating. Kind of a necessary evil, if you could consider that evil. However, I completely understand why the capitalist realm makes average people squirm.

But that said, I usually prefer community projects myself (Fedora spins included), since they tend to have modified setups that are more in line with what regular users would want or need.

Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.

I’ve personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they’ve come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.

I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!

One of these days, I’ll have to give Universal Blue a look for general computing. Bazzite is excellent, but I don’t imagine my MiL is going to care about having Steam and gamescope installed out of the box, should I ever have to do a fresh install for her.

Curious how your atomic distro broke, since you can rollback and rebase pretty easily after a problematic update. I’m running Bazzite on a 10yo laptop, and it’s been great; I even rebased to a completely different DE, then did a rollback when I decided it didn’t work for me.

Not implying anything, but why don’t you trust Red Hat? Because they’re a big company, or because of some other reason?

Podman, from what I can tell, is the result of people wanting a wishlist of fixes/upgrades from Docker and being met with hostility at the notion.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/24/how-to-run-systemd-in-a-container#enter_podman

Great writeup! I have a Brother laser printer, too, and it never occurred to me that I’d need to worry about compatibility when I fully migrate (and at least three immutable distros have been in my top five candidates).

Something else for me to keep in mind!

It’s more the other edge of immutable distros, in this particular case. The entire point is that the system files can’t be modified, but that means working within those restrictions via layering can be tricky in certain cases.

I’ve read that some people are going back to simpler tech stacks, and it feels like they’re just leaving money on the table if that demographic continues to grow.

Who knows, though? Maybe somebody new will fill in that niche.

TBH, I use Powershell on my Windows install, and they’ve made some good improvements over the years. I forget that it also works on Linux.

Shame v1.0 ships with new installations, and you have to manually go out and install the latest versions to get the benefits. Dunno why MS doesn’t just automatically update it with everything else.

I like it, though I’ve used it very little (just no need, ATM). They have some decent practice examples to go through, but it’s definitely a unique way of thinking about package management.

Yeah, I don’t see the point. It’s a browser with bossware enabled; it’s supposed to be for businesses to easily lock down and monitor their employees’ browsers.

From what I gather, it’s very similar. They’re both containerization tools to install software in a container overlay (someone mentioned to me before that they both even draw from the same Docker images).

Toolbx environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc…

I’m not familiar with the finer details, but here’s some example use cases.

ETA: Based on the examples, it reminds me of how NixOS uses nested shells to do things.

It’s not that bad 😆. But there’s definitely a learning curve, something I’m working on figuring out myself, at the moment. There’s some practice guides, but it’s certainly a unique beast.