I chose the middle option for things I’m not hosting, but could see myself hosting in the future.

The worst part about quadlets, IMO, is that they don’t use the same key words as podman run does. So turning a working podman container into a quadlet can be challenging.

I’m in a similar boat. The difference for me is that I can definitely tell times where I’m faster. But there are still times where I fumble around. I know that eventually, I’ll be way faster using vim motions than I ever was without them.

When I first started actually trying to use it to do work, it felt pretty bad. But once I got over the hump it felt better.

I think I’m at the point where I’m at least as fast as I used to be, if not slightly faster.

The ease of switching really just depends. Myself, I’ve had several stumbles switching, but I’m still so happy I did and I’m not going back. My wife on the other hand, has had no issues switching from her Chromebook, because she’s a super basic user who spends all her time in the browser.

Check out Tailscale. It uses Wireguard under the hood, but it’s magic.

containers should be immutable and not be able to write to their internal filesystem

This doesn’t jive with my understanding. Containers cannot write to the image. The image is immutable. However, a running container can write to its filesystem, but those changes are ephemeral, and will disappear if the container stops.

There’s a good deal of misinformation here. The main part being disk space. While it is true that flatpak apps will take up more space, it’s not nearly as bad as you think it is. There is a lot of really good optimization going on under the hood that you don’t see. Dependencies are de duplicated. I’m no expert on it, but I believe that dependencies also have delta changes from one version to the next.

Regarding apps not supporting building of the source, you should get over that or do the work of supporting it yourself. Open source is a hard, usually thankless job.

Thieves are opportunists. Not criminal masterminds. No one is doing car sticker recon.

To me, going and picking up food IS the lazy option. I refuse to be lazier than that. I mean, that’s not true. If delivery was free, I’d use it.

So, slightly tangential, but I have a failed home automation project this past week.

I have been using an unofficial integration for my mini-splits for a few years. The guy who wrote it likes to disappear for 6 months at a time and it seems like it may be abandoned. It finally stopped working after a home assistant update.

I had bought some ESP based replacement dongles about a year ago and decided to finally use them. Well, not all of the features worked, so I set about writing my own firmware.

That ended up working even less well. I wasted a lot of time and effort trying to get my firmware to work before giving up and just moving to the fork of the original Home Assistant integration for the official dongles.

I hate being beholden to third party stuff like this because I have robust automation setup for my mini-splits and updates can completely break them and be a massive pain to fix.

I’m not sad I tried and failed so much as I’m just sad it didn’t work. I may try again sometime in the future.

That’s what Distrobox is for. It’s super useful.

Have you looked at any of the Universal Blue OSs based off of Silverblue? You can rebase to them extremely easily and try them out with no risk.

https://universal-blue.org/

All of Linux requires specialized knowledge. Immutable just takes different knowledge.

The real kicker with that is just that you can’t always just follow instructions you find online. Usually you can, as long as you’re doing them in a Distrobox, though.

I went with immutable as a newbie, and I think it’s great. It feels like getting in on the ground floor of the future.

Debian sounds like a great fit for you. But it’s good to know that Universal Blue has a lot of tools available for installing and tinkering that many just don’t know about. They are extremely powerful OSs.

Who knows. People are passionate about Linux. And downvoting takes no effort. And people downvote stuff randomly.

And Homebrew. I’m a developer and I’ve done all my work just with Homebrew.

You have to reboot machines to run secure kernel code. High uptime means running outdated, vulnerable system code.

Did you ever try using Distrobox? That’s the recommended way if installing random apps.

These distros are great for beginners or less technically savvy. They’re really just harder for people who have been using Linux forever and are very accustomed to the old ways.

Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer’s distros. It’s just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.

Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you’re being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don’t like it or it doesn’t work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.

Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I’m new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I’ve rebased three times. It’s really cool to be able to do that.

You can install packages in immutable distros. It’s just not as easy and recommended as a last resort.

With Universal Blue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) you can install packages with “layering”. It’s basically modifying the image by adding packages on top of what is shipped by the distro, and those packages get added each time the image is updated.

The better, more involved solution is to create your own image from the base image. That gives you a lot more control. You can even remove packages from the base image.