If you are like myself and use your PC mainly for gaming, and your laptop just for casual use (watching videos, writing notes, etc.), then you can also take a look at Bluefin (Gnome) or Aurora (KDE).

It’s a “replacement” for the stock Fedora Silverblue/ Kinoite with QoL stuff and on the spectrum between Bazzite (“bloated”) and the uBlue base image (extremely lean, missing a few standard apps by default) and gives you the choice between “I’m a casual user” (-> only what you need) and the “developer edition”, which includes some IDEs and stuff.

I like it a lot and think of it as “Bazzite, without gaming stuff”. Maybe you’ll like it too!

@babara@lemmy.ml
The difference with Fedora Atomic, which I think you refer to, is that it’s totally open. For example, people started using the OCI containers differently than Fedora intended, which resulted in uBlue and stuff like Bazzite.

Also, no one forces you to use Flatpak. You can still use Distrobox and use Pacman/ APT/ DNF/ whatever you prefer and export your apps that way. It’s just that Flatpak “won” and doesn’t have many drawbacks, and is very convenient. I mostly like them.

And, most importantly, Fedora is the fronteer of innovation.
There were many projects and ideas that failed, but many more succedded (Wayland, image based distros, etc.), and Project Atomic is just one more “testing ground” that is well thought out imo. Therefore people are expecting to “test out” new generation Linux stuff, it’s just part of Fedora. If you don’t like that, use Debian instead.

I can recommend you to give Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Edit: one more thing is that Fedora is, in contrast to Ubuntu, not controlled by a company. RedHat doesn’t have nearly as much influence as people think, it’s mainly community driven, and therefore choices aren’t (in theory) influenced by $$$

You could give the uBlue builder a shot, which can do exactly that.

But I think NixOS is a better choice for a tinkerer like you :)

It won’t transform the old device into a gaming beast, but if you do some lighter gaming with it, why not just try it? :)
If you don’t like it or want something more vanilla/ general purpose, you can always rebase to other Fedora Atomic variants, e.g. Silverblue, Kinoite, uBlue community images (Secureblue, Deepin, etc.) anytime you want! This changes the “flavor” (basically like switching from Linux Mint to Kubuntu by reinstall) without loosing any data or settings with one command. It’s so fucking great!

Are u sure it didn’t shut down when you were away?
uBlue updates itself, yes, but the updates are staged and need a reboot to apply.

That would be very very hard and unreliable.

Bazzite is more than just “preinstalled Steam”, it has a list of tweaks, optimizations and additions so long you can’t even finish reading it all! 😅
This includes a different kernel, pre-configured containers, and much more.
If you do that on a regular system, configuration drift would quickly destroy any good experience in no time and result in a huge mess.

uBlue provides a solid base distribution (pretty much stock Fedora) and applies exactly your way, but in upstream, and then copies that new image to millions of PCs. By doing that, you can provide many many identical copies that are the same everywhere and always up to date, without the burden of maintaining a whole distro like on Nobara.
The hard and boring work of maintaining a distro is on the shoulders of the Fedora team, and you only have to maintain your own changes.

This seems something with too big of an attack surface.

Not really.

• Most stuff is installed in containers
• The pros of image based distros still apply here in terms of reliability, security, etc.
• Its no more than a few hours away from upstream stock Fedora
• Most apps (Lutris, OBS, etc.) are optional and opt-in, if you just click “next, next, next” in the installer you’ll get a relatively vanilla experience compared to stock Fedora

I disagree (a bit at least).

Debian is just as prone to breaking due to the lack of fallbacks (e.g. Snapper), it just doesn’t break as often because it doesn’t change as much as Arch.
If you use a minimal/ default install, this won’t happen as easily, but as soon as you customise anything, you get problems.
Arch can be reliable too, there are many people who have had the same install for years without breaking.

I would actually recommend Fedora Atomic or other image based distros, e.g. VanillaOS.
They can be more modern, while being way more reliable thanks to atomic updates/ transactions, complete image rollbacks and the reproducibility.
They are a dream to use imo!

It’s basically Nobara, but properly done. (If you choose the desktop version)

It gets updates automatically (max one day after upstream Fedora), has everything you want ootb in the first start wizard, is more secure, and much more.

I was very sceptical at first, but after trying it out, I really noticed some minor performance improvements in games and many QoL improvements, e.g. the preinstalled LACT, which allows me to set up fan curves and over-/ underclock my GPU.

Setting up my new PC took me about half an hour maximum.

9/10, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a smooth gaming experience.

What else? :D

I sadly can’t give you any input or help, but I really appreciate your idea and, coincidentally, thought about the exact same thing today 😁

I think a more stable (slower release) variant of Fedora Atomic would be absolutely great for people who don’t like change as much as current Fedora users.

A more conservative variant would be great, especially for companies.
The combination of a stable system (in terms of update frequency and changes) with the unbreakability and deployability would be a huge win.

Imagine being the admin of a small company, class or department and just creating your own uBlue-image with all software your team needs and rebase a dozen PCs to that image. Would be awesome!

I think, currently, Fedora is sometimes too experimental and leading edge, which might be a problem for some people, especially in the business world. Having a more stable variant would be great.

deleted by creator

Stability isn’t the same as unbreakability. It just means the update cycle is prolonged.

If you’re worried about your system breaking, go for Fedora Atomic (Kinoite, Bazzite, uBlue, etc.).
It offers a very recent kernel (-> better hardware support, better performance, etc.) and because it’s an image based distro, you can always roll back, so you’ll always have a working and pretty much unbreakable system.

This sounds like the most reasonable answer here in this thread. I couldn’t have said it better.

Preferences don’t matter if you get paid for it. If your job demands working with software designed for Windows, then use Windows. If you don’t do that, you have to find workarounds that cost time and therefore money, both if you are self employed or have to work for a company.
Either you, or your boss, won’t be happy long term.

If you like Linux more, then use it in your free time, or maybe consider switching your orientation for development to that platform.

Same for development for Apple stuff (e.g. iPhone apps). Then you’re stuck with MacOS too. Or if you have to use certain CAD or Adobe software, then you’re stuck on Windows/ Mac too.

Software availability is great on Linux, and today, you can get most of the stuff working on it, even if it isn’t designed for that. But is it worth it that time and effort? For me, it wouldn’t.

I can’t tell you if Void or any other minimal distro is significantly faster relatively to something more comfortable than Fedora.
But even if it is, then I would still use something “bloated” because it just works and requires less input from my side.
Booting takes just seconds anyway with NVMe disks, so why bother if it takes 4 or 5 seconds, if the PC runs smoother for the next days it is powered on?

Use whatever distro you like more, and install your packages with Distrobox. Here’s a post I made a while ago about it: https://feddit.de/post/8018330

I personally enjoy Fedora Atomic even more than the mutable version, but in your case, you would have to decide for yourself.

Yeah, Feddit.de is currently broken and therefore pictures don’t work atm. Sorry!

Proton is just the compatibility layer, which allows you to play Windows games on Linux.

It’s one of the main reasons so many people switched to Linux in the last months and years, since Proton gets even better from week to week. Something, games designed for Windows run even better on Linux (Proton) than on Windows!

From what I’ve heard, requiring Proton isn’t that bad, especially for the devs. Often, games engineered for Windows run better on Linux than the same ones for Linux.

You can still install Nix (package manager) on Atomic, on uBlue, it even comes pre-installed afaik.

And also, there’s Distrobox, which is totally enough if you prefer package managers over Flatpaks.
I personally like the “reliance” on Flatpaks. I think it reduces the fragmentation and makes it easier for devs, but that’s just my opinion. Do as you prefer.

I don’t like apt too as much. But, interface-wise, you can make it way better with Nala, which is a frontend for it.

NixOS is too complicated and demanding for most users, who aren’t programmers or hobbyists, imo.
I prefer Fedora Atomic. It has the same pros (unbreakable, highly configurable with universal-blue.org, etc.) but feels way more user friendly.
I use it with Distrobox on top, so I can use my package manager/ distro of choice (turned out to be Arch btw) on a extremely reliable system.

For your case, you can replicate Mint by just installing the Cinnamon image from uBlue and applying some minimal tweaks.
Then you get the user friendliness from Mint with the flexibility and unbreakability from NixOS. Do you like the idea? Just in case you get annoyed by NixOS in the future 🙃

I would recommend you to use Fedora Atomic, namely universal-blue.org.
It’s the stock Fedora Atomic, but they offer a Cinnamon spin with baked in Nvidia drivers.
If you don’t know why you should choose an immutable distro, especially as content creator, who wants everything to be always working, check out my post here: https://feddit.de/post/8234416

With that, you can use Distrobox and create a CentOS/ whatever container, which DVR officially recommends and will work best.
You can also check out my post here: https://feddit.de/post/8018330

Maybe ask the company if they can get you an O365-Account, so you can just use the web version of it or install that as webapp.

Sorry to say, but employees cost so much money in salary, those few bucks for software licenses are just minor.