GNOME on Fedora 39 with the Pop Shell extension installed. For me, perfection :)

Hi! Co-maintainer here, you can find the differences in the github repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin

I checked the github page you link and can find no differences listed, just three bullet points that appear to have be written by a PR team. You say an Ubuntu Desktop experience melded with Fedora Silverblue. Don’t you mean GNOME? Ubuntu isn’t a desktop environment, it’s a Linux distro. GNOME is the desktop environment. That seems like an embarassing blunder in your copy when you claim to be building a distro for “serious” developers.

If it weren’t open source, I’d think this was a scam. Weird choice.

On the matter of Ubuntu I think the issues with the OS need to be clarified. From the positive perspective, it is easy to use and just works. From the negative side, it’s become more and more bespoke over time. The Snaps being proprietary and a lot of work in the terminal to activate functions enjoyed out-of-the-box by almost all other distros is very unfriendly. And, I would suggest there are numerous other distros that “just work” but without Ubuntu’s baggage. Mint, Pop_OS!, and Fedora are all easy to install, setup, and use. Even KDE’s Neon is dirt simple to install and use and offers a great KDE experience, if you like that.

That said, however, I believe that Mint is the best distro for new users, though Fedora and Pop are close behind.

To be more inclusive, I suggest changing “…fuckload…” to “…metric fucktonne…” 🤣

Same. I have Fedora 38/39, depending on when I last booted a machine up for updates. Started on Caldera OpenLinux and compiled most everything back in the late 90’s, then moved to Suse, then Ubuntu, then Mint because of Snaps, then Pop_OS!, and now Fedora because it’s like @Secret300@sh.itjust.works says.

I was a Pop user since it first shipped until this year when I switched to Fedora. I still use the Pop Shell extension for GNOME as, IMO, it’s the best tiling extension. Full stop. It’s easy to install and use and is well organized. If you have Nvidia, choose the ISO with the drivers pre-installed. My switch to Fedora was predicated on the fact that I generally use enterprise laptops and 2in1 devices, which is one of Pop’s blind spots when it comes to reliability. Fedora is just dead stable on whatever I put it on, whether its a Latitude 7200 2in1 i7 8th gen or a ThinkPad T400s Core 2 Duo.

I guess Fedora’s an option, too 🤣

To add some clarity, Pop uses GNOME and is working on their own desktop based on Rust and Mint uses Cinnamon, a fork of old GNOME that they’ve significantly upgraded. I’ve used both and like both a lot, but have come to prefer GNOME.

I’d say Pop_OS! which has a spin (version) with Nvidia drivers already installed. Below is a direct link. It’s based on Debian, so it enjoys excellent app support. Linux Mint is also a good choice.

https://iso.pop-os.org/22.04/amd64/nvidia/35/pop-os_22.04_amd64_nvidia_35.iso

Oh yes! Thanks for reminding me. The ~ is a shortcut to the active users home folder? Thanks!

dd duplicates directories. It’s a terminal app. Built into all Linux distros. For more details, do a man dd in a terminal session. Clonezilla is a distro that runs a live system from USB or DVD which lets you backup and restore entire systems. Both are powerful, but have a learning curve.

Definitely take your time and soak up more info from other sources :) I hope all of this turns out to be at least marginally helpful :D

If you don’t encrypt the drive, yes. Some things you will have to reauthenticate, however, like your online accounts, but when those are reconnected everything should work as intended. That you should confirm, however. I don’t encrypt, though I should ;)

I’m utterly useless with base arch 🤣 If it works for you, who’m I to complain 👍

I guess I should have made that clear. Your /home directory is where everything user-related is stored in invisible folders. All your settings for the OS and applications are kept in there. So, if you copy that directory and restore it to a fresh install of the same distro, all of your settings will be restored. It’s been years, but I’ve done it a few times.

The only thing you’ll really need to do after that is re-install all of the apps you installed. Once you have, however, every apps settings are restored.

~/boot is at the root of the drive. Your home folder should be in ~/home/username. THAT you can copy wholesale. I believe. Don’t take my word for it. Deja Dup can do it for you, as well, or the entire system.

So is this possible? and if yes, how should I go about this? did someone make a tool for this already? Or(!) can I burn it to a flash and the drivers will correct themselves/I’ll deal with them later?

I think this is where a few respondents got the impression you are looking at this like a Windows install. It is not. All of the drivers, minus proprietary (also called non-free) drivers (i.e., Nvidia, file format support, etc), are already included in the installation. On laptops, this can get weird with some of the laptop-specific hardware, but most of it works out of the box most of the time. Exceptions are old WinTel-era wireless and networking cards which needed a terrible driver wrapper, but has long since fallen out of favor. Thankfully!

I’m not an expert in Linux, but I’ve been using it for more than 20 years. I used to be plagued by this issue, but since online services have matured, I’ve got most of my stuff synced up. That, and my NAS and an external drive for backups. I do have a few thoughts, though.

One, I believe you can simply copy your /home directory and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install. This strikes me as a limiting option, as it doesn’t allow you to distro hop, at least not seamlessly. Also, get an external drive for backups. I use Deja Dup for simple, easy backups and restorations.

Two, I would suggest you investigate either Fedora (https://getfedora.org) or Pop_OS! (https://pop.system76.com/) as an alternative. Fedora is based on Red Hat, which is very mature, but strikes a nice balance between the latest software and reliability. Pop_OS! is Debian-based, which is also a very well matured OS, though System76 has made some major improvements. I use their Pop Shell extension for GNOME on Fedora 39 for window tiling, easily the best I’ve used on any Linux distro. Regardless, almost any other distro should be easier to get going over Arch. Sorry, Arch users ;)

Three, if you really don’t want to leave Arch, check out Manjaro. It’s Arch-based, but it’s quite a bit easier to set up.

Four, if you’d still like to try borking things, but without facing consequences, I’d set up a local VM using Boxes for GNOME or VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). That way you can test stuff without risking your functional system. Boxes is better, IMO, since it can install distros from the app itself. The list has at least 100 distros of all types to choose from, including Haiku and FreeBSD. It would be good, however, if you have at least 16GBs of RAM, though I generally run VMs with 4GBs of RAM, Linux can run fine with 2GBs.

I hope that helps :)