If you’re going to use nvidia, don’t even touch wayland. Truly an awful experience.

Bloat does matter it is extremely important, not because having a bunch of apps slows anything down or has any tangible impact in that regard. Because it isn’t as sexy as somebody’s hyper specific gentoo install compiled without some specific module.

The reason bloat is such a big deal, particularly if you’re new to it, is because it’s confusing. if you’re trying to fix a problem that you have run into / possibly contributed to, a dozen different programs running in the background that you didn’t put there is going leave you frustrated and disenfranchised.

Pick a modular distribution like Arch, take the loss that is your weekend putting it together and develop an understanding of how the pieces fit together. If you really don’t have time choose something like eg endeavourOS. ( or even Void is quite nice (but non systemd so less conventional))

I would personally recommend avoiding something like fedora or Debian. They are both fantastic distributions that work very well. They are not good at teaching new users how to fix problems and that should be your primary goal here.

Well I tried Aeon for a month and it has been the least reliable system I’ve used since, well actually probably anything, like maybe vista I guess.

The thing is a mess and it brings nothing to the table over A/B snapshots.

The scales must be different for enterprise use because I’d never go near another immutable OS again after this terrible experience.

Maybe it’s just flatpak that’s unreliable on Aeon, I found moving electron apps into podman containers was a lot better. But on void it was fine, clearly a lot more work to do the flesh it out I goes.

Tbf SB had far less issues than Aeon.

I appreciate this is more asking about nicks, but I’ll offer some feedback on my experience with immutable distributions more generally.

I took an adventure into silver blue and micro OS recently and I was completely unimpressed. It’s a novel idea from a good place, but it was the most incoherent and buggy experience I’ve ever had on Linux distribution in the past 10 years. Nothing walked reliably, and everything broke, I also found that trying to use anything other than the default gnome desktop was an exercise in futility.

I need to clarify, I think it’s a great idea. In practice though, Both implementations, silver blue and micro OS, are really over engineered.

I have adapted the ideas into my current install and I achieve the same thing with A/B Snapshots And a script that takes me from a base snapshot to my daily driver. Everything else exists in containers So bootstrapping up only involves half a dozen packages (iwd, node, nvim etc. ).

I’ve had this before, try a different kernel, like an LTS, if that fixes it, there’s likely a kernel parameter somewhere to fiddle with.

So Ubuntu, Ubuntu and unstable arch… here let me have a go:

1. Fedora
2. Tumbleweed
3. Endeavour OS

• easy install arch with extra repos, zfs and and dracut

4. Bonus for the curious

• void
• Redcore Gentoo

The manual is OK, much of it’s out dated and often outright wrong. It is still a great document.

Edits to the wiki are often knocked back if they weren’t made by the inner circle, discussions on the back page are often closed and frankly the TUs are mostly wankers. The forum policy on necro-bumping leaves half answers everywhere but the notion of “put it in the wiki” is undermined by the toxic community among inner party members.

Arch is a great middle ground between Fedora and Gentoo, but I had to walk away because the community was so toxic and childish.

I’m using void and Gentoo now and I’m pretty happy, anything that doesn’t run works in a container anyway.

TL;DR: community behaviour is much more important to me than technical use.

Also, if it’s just the DE, install sway / i3 and try that for a week. If you liked that it’s on literally every Linux distribution, even the BSDs.

Go with EndeavourOS. It won’t “just work”, but it will be the best compromise between confusing abstraction and low level frustrations.

Fedora is good but it abstracts a little too much away, this is great when you understand how software works, but it’s very confusing when you’re new to Linux and programming.

Arch is good, but you won’t be able to hid the ground running, you’d have to sacrifice a weekend to learn.

Go:

0. [Optional] Fedora
1. Endeavour
2. Arch
3. Learning

• Ghost BSD
• Void
• Gentoo

Tinkering with those in that order, after about 6 months, you’ll start to feel at home.

Worth mentioning that one can use bubblewrap directly over chroot to get similar behaviour as well.

It’s often simpler to use distrobox but being able to rsync chroot a between devices can be very convenient.

Cachy is a great live usb because it has zfs.

I enjoyed arch for how straight forward the install was.

Gentoo however, every time I do that from scratch it’s with X, Westland is NetworkManager that give up (my recommendation is oddlamma installer)

It’s great but still really unstable. I’ll be sticking with Sway / DWM for a bit longer.

However, it looks promising.

Similarly OpenSuse Aeon. A Benefit of Suse is the greater portability of the tooling.

Well, no, neither approach is better than the other, it’s apples and oranges.

There will always be a place for installing native applications. In the least analysis, the container itself should probably have some dependencies packaged for the target program.

The benefits of containerisation are obvious, but it’s been a lot of work and there are still edge cases to iron out.

FreeBSD has had jails since 2000. Linux, however, only got namespaces in 2008 and the first bubblewrap release on GitHub was 2016.

I’ve been using chroots and containers for development for about 2 years now and it’s been fantastic, however, I’m still grateful I don’t have to jump inside one every time I need to write a python script.

The ZFS stuff was exciting! Are they still incorporating zfs in current releases though?

Snap is a sandboxed environment to install applications in.

Flatpak is a more portable implementation of the same broad idea, it downloads a chroot and runs applications from within using a separate program called bubblewrap (one could, in theory, use chroot to run apps from within the downloaded flatpak images, bubblewrap offers further isolation through things like namespaces and cgroups etc. )

Snap, unlike flatpak, is a Canonical specific implementation that has a reputation for breaking a lot of things.

PL can have a large impact on features, bugs, bug reports, troubleshooting, performance and documentation. Particularly when dev resources are limited.

It’s hard to see how this opinion holds any water.

Rust is a great choice for a shell built as an interactive shell that doesn’t have to be core to the OS. Over C++ this also makes development more accessible to young programmers.

It’s pretty easy, just Install snapper and cron. Endeavour also supports zfs out of the box which can be better for certain use cases.

Edit: typo

I absolutely love void. Second to that I would say endeavour, it’s just arch with zfs, a wm and an installer.

If you’re interested in learning more try , I use oddlama’s installer. With binary packages, distrobox and flatpak, the small amount of compile time is a much smaller issue.

Alternatively, if you’re thinking about Fedora maybe play with Silverblue, it forces you to learn a bit of containerisation which is handy

Once you get comfortable arch is a good choice too.

It’s not that complex and it’s a good way to learn.

Then of course is Gentoo which is a bit more complex.