Heyy, just some guy floating around on the internet. Always down for a chat during my off-hours
I run Silverblue on 2 devices (my main computer and laptop) for half a year. It works and I didn’t have any major issues with it. Though as you might have experienced with other immutable distros, some things like configuring gdm might be a bit more work. But for most things there is a flatpak. The only software that couldn’t be installed that wat was my vpn.
If you want to try out something new, NixOS or Guix might be more up your alley
A bit off topic but the way you’re writing this post makes me feel old, and I’m in my low 20s
I am mad I didn’t get the summer shrimpin role (I barely use DIscord)
I personally like Cryptpad. It can be self hosted, but you can also make an acount elsewhere considering you don’t want the hastle of maintaining.
Overleaf can be self hosted too
Gnome with a ton of extensions and a Catpuccin theme for gtk apps
I’m mainly going into the negatives because the positives are fewer in number. Though those few do outweigh the negatives I’m about to write about. In my opinion at least
From what I’ve read it’s a lot better than what it used to be, but you can still bump into some weird issues that require more knowledge of your computer (compared to Windows) to get it fixed. Usually it’s audio, Flatpak permission issues or some application that comes preinstalled but crashes anyway. (i.e. Kontact on Fedora’s KDE spin). And in one case NetworkManager just disappeared on the family computer.
Gaming can be an issue, depending on what you like to play. AAA games with an important online component usually don’t work on Linux because of their anti-cheat. Not all of them of course like CS2, Rivals, and Dota 2. It was a bummer since I switched to Linux with the expectation that I’d still be able to keep on playing League, only to see it being unusable after a year. But if your friend group doesn’t play those kind of games (and I got lucky on that part), you’re fine. For example Peak and Gambling with Friends just worked on launch. I didn’t even bother looking at ProtonDB
I’ve seen a lot of people downplay the fact that you may not be able to play the games with invasive anti-cheat. But if that’s the game you (or your friends) like to play, that’s the game you like to play. No shame in that, especially if you don’t care/mind the anti-cheat. It’s your computer, you don’t have to be fully into foss to use Linux and you should (in my opinion) be able to weight the pros and cons yourself.
Another con (for people who just want to use their computer) or pro (for those who like to thinker around) is choice. There are so many distro’s with a ton of DE’s and ways of customising those DE’s where a new user will probably get stuck just deciding what they want to pick. Or you can just as easily look at something more technical and decide what compositor or init system you want to use. It’s a lot and for many users the deeper stuff doesn’t really matter to them.
I wasted* at lot of time tinkering with my Nix configs and my Arch install to not even use either distro anymore. It can get a bit much, especially if the thing you’re tinkering with is your main computer. Now I just have a separate second hand laptop to mess around with now so it doesn’t get in the way of actual work.
All of my most painful issues wouldn’t have been too bad if I just had someone to guide me in the right direction. This became really apparent when a friend of mine bumped into a lot of the same issues I did when he switched. He got his fixed fairly quickly since I was there to explain, for example, what was wrong with his fstab config and why he got into emergency mode because of that.
*It was a ton of fun looking back at it (and educational). But if you go into it with the idea that it’ll help you (in part) with productivity, you’re going to have some regrets with the time you actually spent on it in the moment
I don’t think it would’ve been an issue if they just put a warning in the getting started section in the docs (or if they just have secure defaults to begin with). But currently there’s no mention of it. It took almost a year for me to realise that I was running “production ready code” in root
You can run docker without root as well with docker rootless
Don’t tell me you actually read through the millions of lines of driver code in the Linux kernel
Heyhey, nice overview, though on the “just works” thing on atomic/immutable distros I want to say that that’s not the case by virtue of a system being atomic.
I’m on Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite layers on) and the codecs you’d expect being on there aren’t because of licensing (just like all of Fedora’s distros).
I also don’t believe Fedora Atomic does anything in particular in regards to drivers. So the advantages you’re talking about are there because of the people who worked on Bazzite.
On breakage, it’s definitely not a bad thing for a system to *gently* push users into installing software in user space and with some isolation, but it’s far from a requirement for a stable system.
And if you’re going to be layering everything anyway (so installing basically only installing using rpm-ostree), you’re not gaining much by choosing an atomic distribution. Those layers can conflict like with any other distro packages
Fedora KDE, which I ran for almost a year, has not given me any issues except for the codecs which I had to install myself.
It’s actually more of a pain to get codecs to work on Fedora Atomic because of how RPM Fusion needs to work with layering (https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/OSTree), which wasn’t an issue on standard Fedora.
So you’ll end up needing to manually updating the repository RPM Fusion repository every 6 months.
Also some software, like Steam, is also a pain to work with when using the Flatpak. \
VanillaOS (which *doesn’t* use rpm-ostree since it’s based on Debian) and Bazzite are both good atomic distros if you really want that, while having those kind of annoyances handled for you.
I have GOS, you can’t remove it unfortunately. Those kind of people are everywhere online but never forget it’s your device. You can do with it whatever the hell you want, regardless of what the “point” of anything is.
I’m currently using a Pixel with GOS on it. But I “went away from Google” (stopped using their services) because I don’t trust them to keep the telemetry about me they store safe. (Or use it in a way I’m fine with).
And altering the physical hardware in a way to spy on a phones users, irregardless of the operating system, isn’t a reasonable concern (I believe you can think of a fair few reasons).
There are very few phones that actually have open firmware, which is unfortunate, but in most peoples cases (like when you don’t trust Google to use your data responsibly) they can accept that risk. They have done it with every other phone they used as well. And those were (probably) a lot less open than Pixels are.
You can also make the more meta-argument that since the police in Catalonia and French law enforcement saw those phones as a threat, you can be sure you have secure phone in your hands.
p.s. This was a lot less concise than I expected. Sorry for the text wall :)
In Belgium at least it is illegal to circumvent copy protection. This isn’t even exclusive to the US, so I’m not sure where you got that idea from. So it is perfectly legal here to rip a cd from the public library but not necessarily for a Blu-Ray you bought
Edit: dvd’s can have copy protection so in that case it would depend on the specific dvd