This is a story all about how… one sad old sack finally “got” Linux distros.
I’ve been a very casual Linux user over 20-odd years, mostly on secondary PCs and generally sticking with noob-friendly distros, but only in the last few months I’ve become serious and started to learn the how and why of Linux.
Like many others, this year is my own personal year of Linux on the desktop. My server, media box and laptops are all now running Fedora, only my primary PC remains left behind on Win10 because of critical software keeping me tied to Windows - but from next week that is no longer needed and the shackles are off! I’ve sampled several different Distros this year to find the perfect fit for this very moment, but this search reminded me how the sheer number of distros annoyed me.
I’ve always seen the vast number of Distros as wasteful. Effort that could be put into pushing Linux forward rather than creating another fork sideways. I’m not sure now what I thought a distro actually was but I’ve now come to realise the genius of this (not to say there isn’t any replication and waste between Distros).
I had settled on KDE Fedora as my distro of choice some time ago. Then, when I found the idea of an immutable distro, this appealed (to help prevent my dumb-arse breaking things), so I pivoted to Kinoite to give me exactly what I wanted. All I needed was to work out how to get Steam running. Many of you can probably already see where this is going.
In a moment of Picard-level face-palming, I started exploring Bazzite thinking this would give me an idea of what’s required. The distro itself looked good and when I went digging deeper, I found an Immutable, Fedora base in either KDE or Gnome. Bazzite is basically Atomic Fedora, pre-configured for gaming! Face-smack. Maybe I thought Bazzite was based on Arch which is why I hadn’t looked at it before, but now I better understood the genius of Linux distros. The Bazzite team could take the core of what they want, then tweak it for a specific use-case and release it, thinking others might like it too. They’re not reinventing the wheel as I first believed, they were building upon previous work. One of the greatest strengths of open source. I probably already knew this but somehow, I hadn’t quite put the pieces together in one place.
TL;DR: I’m a numpty
Tune in tomorrow when I argue that no one should recommend Arch to anyone - and why that’s a good thing…
Wait until you realize that you don’t have to reinstall the OS to go from Fedora Kinoite to Bazzite or the otherway around, just rebase and reboot 🤭
🤯
Is this like moving from flavor to flavor or release name to release name? Cause going from Linux mint Xia back to Virginia is a pain in the dick.
It basically just runs dd on your root partition with the new image.
Fedora seems similar to clear Linux os, on the idempotent/deterministic scale. Swupd was quite fricticious, not very intuitive to users
There is nothing dumb-arse about learning new things. It is nice that you discovered Bazzite through your own research.
Enjoy the new OS and let us know your thoughts after your first run.
Why the Arch hate?
Arch users recommending Arch to beginners. In other words, Arch is fine, the community isn’t.
Wait do you put all of your posts under a CC license?
Because it’s widely known that ai bros totally care and respect copyrights so when the bot sees that comment, will 100% remove that post from their training data instead of just ignoring it and continue scraping the same url 20 times a minute
Definitely no hate for Arch, just me being a smart arse ;)
It’s too good ;) :D
Glad you found the distro you like. The beauty of GNU Linux is that it isn’t one-size-fits-all/none. There’s plenty of options to suite individual needs. As for Arch, there’s no need to fear it. There are plenty of Arch based distros that are geared towards gaming, SteamOS for example.
Interesting post.
I’ve always been really interested about immutable distros, but I haven’t broken my Fedora Workstation 42 yet, so I won’t switch until I do.
What would be a game changer for me is a distro that you could easily replicate (settings, apps and data) from one computer to another. From what I know Nix is the closest thing but it ain’t easy to approach…
I believe I’ve heard that you can use the Nix configuration tool that gives this functionality on any distro? But yes, I’ve also avoided it so far because it seems complicated. Perhaps in the future, when I’m more versed on Linux.
Oh I’ve never heard of the Nix configuration tool. I might look into it when the need arises.
For sure, it seems to be much less talked about than the distro itself. I’m not sure how well it works on other distros, so that would warrant research.
