Generally speaking, you’re right.
But Bazzite is different. It’s built on uBlue/ Fedora Atomic and therefore barely needs maintenance, both for the devs and the users. Keeping a distro secure and updated is a huge burden normally, but here, it’s done from upstream via Github-actions.

Also, community wise, it already has a big one AND Fedora Atomic guides also apply to that, e.g. install scripts.

Another pro is that the Nvidia drivers are baked into the image, so if they break, they’re instantly fixed by the devs, because then everyone has a broken system. But that’s no problem, since you can just roll back in seconds.

For a pure gaming focused device like this one, a special distro makes sense. You’ll get a better experience and performance compared to Mint for example, due to kernel patches, built in tools, etc.

+1 for Fedora Atomic. uBlue is pretty much vanilla Silverblue/ any other spin, but with some QoL stuff included.

You can’t get a more reliable base on a relatively stable (in terms of update frequency), yet modern platform.

Don’t use Discord, rather use the official uBlue-forum. That way, everything is public, better organized, accessible and not in the hand of some chinese corporation.

I think many here misunderstood your intention. The combination of “server” and “what DE?” is a weird thing for most of us, especially since you said headless, which usually means no desktop, only ssh and stuff.

But I think I understand what you are up to.
You want something mainly for gaming, where the PC acts as “brain” of the games, and you only stream them to a low-power device, similar to what Stadia was planned. Right?

For that, I’ll recommend Bazzite with Moonlight or how it’s called.
Bazzite is a gaming oriented Fedora Atomic spin that has Nvidia-drivers already baked in, updates itself (you only need to reboot once in a while) and gives you a great experience, even offering to boot straight into Steam’s BPM.

Moonlight/ Sunshine/ whatever is a screen sharing protocol or software that allows you to stream games without latency or much quality loss.

I’m no pro tho, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt :)

Looks fucking awesome!

There aren’t enough light theme setups out there, and yours looks very clean and well thought out. I especially like that the shadows of the window decorations are better visible on the light theme, that gives it a way better spacial look than on dark ones.

The only thing I would change personally, if I would copy it, is the right area of the top bar, that one looks a bit too crowded for me compared to the rest of the more minimalist setup.
I would drag the widgets, except the tray, onto the desktop or so.

Please also don’t forget to link your themes (and other stuff) used or customized in the post, for others to recreate :)

I think either PostmarketOS or Mobian would be the best existing candidates right now.
Hardware wise, the Fairphone 4 is probably the best option, especially compared to something like a Pinephone.

I tried Phosh (Gnome mobile shell) on an exhibition a while ago and honestly loved it.

However, I’m absolutely not confident in those tbh, in terms of reliability. The whole thing is highly experimental right now, and I wouldn’t trust them as a daily driver.

Phosh is also available for Fedora, especially Silverblue (available as ARM iso), since you are, with me together, probably one of the most prominent Fedora Atomic fanboy :D

I see big potential in a uBlue-phone spin maybe. I tried making one myself, but I absolutely don’t have a clue what I’m doing and don’t want any responsibility for such a project.
Do you know if or how we could organise such a project?

what you meant by ‘outdated’ regarding Pop!_OS? What’s wrong with it?

There’s nothing “wrong” with Pop. It’s just that the devs are currently more focused on creating their new own DE instead of working on the current distro, and therefore, no new development is happening right now.
This is of course understandable, and I still would recommend Pop, since it’s in a fine state right now and still works good.

If one wants newer features or releases, I would recommend checking out Bazzite (when gaming focused) or regular Fedora and then applying some tweaks on it to recreate the Pop-experience.

Thanks for the perspective. It’s always hard to balance “just enough to get a comfortable first experience and everything works” and “bloated system”.

In my opinion, Mint manages that well, and I think if I put the description “rather lean out of the box” to describe Debian might be worth an idea. Having a more minimalist system can also be a fresh breath of air, you’re right in that. Some people prefer to manually install the stuff they need, others want a full experience. Good input, thanks!

I’m perhaps too much of a (wannabe) perfectionist/tryhard, which is why the process described in my previous post was a lot more involved and (perhaps) therefore more utopian/idealist than realistic.

Same for me, with the addition of me being a people-pleaser. I already have to select which voice I listen to, since there are hundreds of different ones contradicting each other.
Right now, I think I’ve spent enough time for the next days :D I will consider making a small website out of that, but that’s more of a hobby project and learning experience for me.

Ironically, the first time I installed a relatively immature version of an atomic distro (Fedora Kinoite, but like its first release (so Fedora 35 at the time)), it was a very bad experience and I rebased right away to Silverblue and haven’t look back since 🤣

Yeah, I know that too well… the pain of being an early adopter :D Fedora Atomic has matured heavily, and I think it is perfectly usable, both in terms of reliability and availability.
It’s just that it is quite different from other distros, especially when you want to install apps. For newcomers, just telling them to go into the software center and selecting the apps to install (via Flatpak) is perfectly enough. It only gets a bit more complicated when they want more and have to turn to the CLI (e.g. Distrobox).

“Fedora is the new Ubuntu”

Sure, under two conditions.

1. You say that you didn’t create the content yourself, and only provided the translation.
2. You provide the link to the original post very visibly, preferably in a small statement in the beginning.

Otherwise, here’s the raw file (Draw.io, FOSS, also available as Flatpak) and the Markdown text for you to paste. Link: https://notebin.de/?bacad84b46e92d92#3ZzsNgjBMCxudUGrJ6TV9hZTh5hFt1ctiAYgbuUNcjf2

Isn’t that what you want?

Thank you for your elaborate answer! <3

I’ve been following Linux-related subs (Reddit, Lemmy, etc.) for years now, and I constantly saw the flood of

“I’m a bit techy, but more casual, have normal hardware and use my PC sometimes for gaming. I’m fed up with Windows, what distro should I take?”

-posts. The guide is mainly meant for exact this kind of new users, who are perfectly fine with either Fedora or Mint. I excluded edge-cases, like QubesOS, completely on purpose, as this should be consisting of only 2 (or so) distros with different DEs. This should make 80% of exactly those post redundant. If someone wants a “non-normal” distro, they can still of course feel free to ask.

Hardware probe

I thought about that too, but I think people with super old hardware (32-bit, 500 mb RAM, etc.) are such an edge case too. Most people with halfway recent devices (<5-10 years) have at least 4 GB RAM and should be fine with major distros/ DEs. If they still have problems, they can also come here to ask or choose the “low-performance hardware”-arrow from the chart.

Investigate their intended usage and what software they would rely on

Again, the majority of people coming here are a bit techy casual users. If they had no clue about anything, they wouldn’t think about Linux in the beginning, and if they already had a clue or a lot of experience, they would do the research alone.
I wanted this “Choose the right distro”-post to be only one puzzle piece of a collection, where I also want to explain what Linux can do and what it doesn’t, e.g. CAD or some games.
By keeping it very short and only focusing on the distro part, it can be linked more selectively.
I also planned posts like “How to Ventoy”/ “How to install, and what problems may occour”, why one shouldn’t use Linux (expectations), and much more.

Update cadence / Priorities

Will include it on the arrows and the text, good idea.

The only important thing to note would be that in all cases customization is allowed and thus they shouldn’t necessarily abandon a DE for a minor issue as it’s most likely easily solvable.

I already put this into the text I think, read the part with Gnome extensions and stuff :)

If this gets good (and it certainly has the potential), then only the flowchart itself will be shared while the accompanied text might be disregarded. In hopes of ensuring that others also read the accompanied text, consider to either (somehow) include the text in the image of the flowchart or include a link to the text and ensure it’s easily found and one is somehow able to easily access the text through the link. This might even require a shortened custom url that redirects to the text. The exact specifics are obviously up to you though.

I thought about using Sozi as a tool to achieve that. I have to research tho how to make a website first.
My idea was to keep the exact structure of the chart, but when you zoom in a lot to the distro, you get the description.

I can’t agree with the inclusion of both Pop!_OS and Vanilla OS

Same, but I asked a few days prior in another post if I should include them or not, and nobody disagreed. I see VanillaOS as a great competitor to Mint, especially for people who want something of a managed and simple experience, while also being capable to do normal PC stuff. I see VOS 2 as “stable” enough in just a few weeks, there’s mainly only some polishing and fixing in newer under-the-hood stuff, but the surface-stuff is already fine.

While I (somewhat) understand why you’ve tried to tie one’s preferences in earlier used OSes to a potential desktop environment they might like, I do think that this might set new users up for false expectations

That was a suggestion from someone else from the previous post, which I liked, and it shouldn’t imply that “Mint is just like Windows” or “Fedora is like using your Android phone” at all. It’s mainly about preference, if one likes a simple UI or prefers traditional workflows. How can I make that more clear?

Your advice with positive framing (pointing out what makes it unique, instead of telling what it doesn’t have) is a good idea. I will try to implement those tips next time, thanks.

Oh, yeah, the original commenter explained it. Whoops! :D Good to know, I always find Lemmy’s colorful variety of people awesome! 🌈

It’s just that I was a bit confused with terms like btrfs, xfce, TWM, and so on, and thought it was something Linux-related I didn’t know about yet, haha 😅

I just made a separate post on why no Ubuntu or Debian, see https://feddit.de/post/9127111

Sorry, maybe I’m a bit out of the loop, but what is “mrrp”? I tried to google it, but couldn’t find a Linux related thing.

About reliability, I think having something like the rollback in Fedora Silverblue (or even just Snapper from Suse) is superior to a “stable base”. With something stable, you basically say “Hm, we don’t need a backup, it shouldn’t break anyway”, but when it does, which it can and maybe will, you’re fucked.
I already broke my Silverblue install a few times, but getting a working system again was just one reboot away, no restoring or troubleshooting required.

I just flipped through your posts, and your “guide” reads more like a rant for an inexperienced user of each of the distributions you mention, and only from one lens of trying to convince someone of something. Not very impartial or informed writing.

Hm… I don’t exactly understand what you mean. Newcomers and experienced users alike gave me good feedback on the guide, even the mods liked it, and with this post here, I’m trying to improve my guide even more.

I tried to be as neutral as possible, and also had to simplify stuff a lot regarding the “uninformed writing”. I just can’t go too much into detail/ nuance or mention every distro out there, because otherwise, this guide wouldn’t make any sense. If one wants to get an detailed overview over every distro out there, they’re at the wrong ressource.
I tried to make it especially for the sole point of “Here’s one simple distro, use that for now, it’s a solid choice.”, because there are so many ones out there, but which are overwhelming due to choice.

I don’t think you understand the purpose of Debian and it’s slower release schedule with it’s mission statement.

I do. Having a longer stretched release schedule with feature freezes gives devs time to iron out bugs or other issues, and especially for server use or people who don’t like change on their desktop, this is also an advantage.
I just think 3 years is too long for a lot of desktop users, especially when they’re younger and want new stuff, in particular for hardware compatibility (drivers, kernel, etc.).
Linux Desktop is evolving very fast, and 3 years is a hell lot of time.

You also don’t seem to understand your writing, because you say this is a guide for beginners, then devolve into a bunch of arguments which beginners wouldn’t understand or care about.

See above, I don’t get your point, please elaborate further. Newcomers said it gave them a great first impression and overview, and experienced users didn’t rip me apart midst air, which I see as a win :D
If you mean this specific post about Debian here, I made it a bit provocative on purpose, since I want all your opinions and you changing my view.

You also don’t seem to grasp the concepts of each of these distributions in general and why they are the way they are. The entire point of maintaining a distinct distro (forked or not) is to include something the parent does not. That’s the differentiating factor.

I did…? I split it up in three groups: Debian/ Ubuntu based (but basically only differing in their DE), Fedora, and Immutables. And then I explained each on why I chose it and what defines them. Apart from the immutables, which I see a huge potential in, especially VanillaOS for users who don’t want to interact with their system, there are no controversial choices in my post.

I see it similarily. For me, it’s also just a “very slow Arch” in some regards.
There are way too many people conflicting stability with reliability. Debian is one of the most stable distros out there, sure, but if it breaks, you have no recommended-by-default safety measures, like on Mint (recommended backups via Timeshift) or Suse (Snapper).

I added this point in my list now.

Thank you for your input!