What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.
I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.
Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
For me that would be Fedora (preferably KDE). I currently am on Aurora (Kinoite fork), but that’s because I value stability very highly (except for immutable and Debian nothing is stable enough).
Regular Fedora is more than stable enough for day to day use. I’d start there and then with use see if it’s a good fit.
Not OP, but can you sell me on Aurora? Every time I’ve tried any of the Fedora Immutable distros they just feel slow and awkward. I have a few tools that need rpm-ostree installs and fighting with flatpak permissions is the bane of my existence
If you had problems with fedora atomic aurora likely isn’t for you. Its main changes are adding stuff like codecs and drivers to the image and making distrobox more accessible. What tools do you use? Aurora-dx comes with brew preinstalled so maybe they are available there. Also using distrobox completely skips flatpak permissions so maybe that would help you
Well that certainly sounds like it’s worth investigating, at the very least. Thanks!
The big problem for me was SSH and IDE tools. Iirc they only worked with stuff installed on the base image (I use 1Password’s ssh agent)
bluefin/aurora co-maintainer here, the 1password ssh agent is a miniboss we haven’t conquered yet, just a heads up.
Thanks for your fantastic work! I actually successfully moved both my laptop and desktop to ublue distros last night!
It turns out Bazzite was the image for me though, far easier to layer VSCode and 1Password onto Bazzite than getting steam working on Bluefin
Quick question: is Aurora dev desktop plus dev stuff, or less desktop stuff?
There are a few improvements in Aurora over Silverblue that you might like.
It ships with homebrew which is perfect for CLI tools.
It ships with distrobox instead of toolbx which is much better. You can install any distro while toolbx is just a Fedora. For example I’m using Arch in toolbox because of the number of packages and the fact that they’re usually up to date (no need to wait for a major release).
So far I never had to use rpm-ostree, and for VSCode I use distrobox precisely because of the permissions.
I’m downloading Bluefin DX as we speak! Definitely gonna play with it a bit
For anyone following this thread, I successfully moved my gaming desktop and my framework laptop to Bazzite last night!
I initially went with Bluefin, but it was easier to layer VSCode and 1Password onto Bazzite than it was to get Steam working on Bluefin
I’ve enjoyed my time on fedora. It’s recent enough that my hardware works when I upgrade, and stable and supported enough that I haven’t had to go out of my way to get something working.