I am considering moving away from Ubuntu, but I haven’t tried other distributions for years. I started on Linux Mint Cinnamon back in 2012, but switched to Ubuntu when I built my current PC in 2020 because I wanted more up-to-date packages. Now I am faced with needing to replace my SSD which gives me reason enough to install a new distro. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with 32G of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, so I would need something that plays nicely with nvidia. I routinely use libreoffice, digikam, gimp, virtualbox, bambu studio, sublime text, filezilla, thunderbird, minecraft, steam, Open WebUI and Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111). I liked Ubuntu because it was familiar, fairly easy to customize, and everything was kept fairly well up to date. I am not a big fan of snap, and I would prefer a more logical and unified package management system. I was wondering if you all had some recommendations for me. Thanks
Thank you very much for the recommendations! Out of curiosity, what are the benefits of using say bluefin over just plain fedora? I should also add that I prefer a long term support installation because I don’t reinstall very often. Thanks again
Let’s say we compare regular Fedora (Workstation) or KDE spin with Vanilla Silverblue or Kinoite (Atomic).
Fedora Atomic is the newest generation of Linux, as some people call it.
It is a bit similar to how Android works. Basically, the core operating system is “locked up”, and everything you do is done as normal user, including app installations.
Therefore, you have a “you” section, with all Flatpak apps and cat videos, and a “OS” part, which you don’t have to care about.
Of course this is still Linux, and you have full sudo permissions and can still install all software on the host system, e.g. Nvidia drivers. Upstream Fedora Atomic is good, but has some minor flaws, like users having to install said Nvidia drivers or codecs manually.
uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin, etc.) basically take the upstream image and rebuild it with a lot of tweaks and optimizations, like having codecs (e.g. for watching videos) already included. They especially try to make everything as user friendly as possible and provide a “just works” distro.
As I said, it’s a bit similar to how you use Android: you don’t use Android, it’s only a platform for you to launch your apps. You don’t worry about codecs, updates gone wrong, or whatever. You just use it and don’t think about it. And that’s the mission. Building an extremely robust and simple OS.
You’ll never have to reinstall anything. If an update comes out, either a big release or just bug fixes, they get installed in the background and then applied onto the next boot without any interference. You don’t notice it.
And if you really want to switch to another variant, e.g. when the new Cosmic DE comes out, you can do it with just one command. With that, the “you” section is kept, and the “OS part” is swapped out.
And if you worry about being too bleeding edge, you can choose the ´gts´ variant of Bluefin, which is a more conservative branch with less surprises.
That was a supremely enlightening explanation! I’m installing bluefin in a vbox to check it out and ordering a new SSD. Thank you!
I use Aurora (the KDE version) as a software dev/ gaming machine. It’s great!
One thing to keep in mind with this is it’s “a new way” so expect hickups. I use Bazzite on my living room PC, and have had:
yumwasn’t supported for what I wanted to doI do love Bazzite, and just recommended it in another thread, but I would not run it on my workhorse.
I’m also on Bluefin for my daily driver and Bazzite for my Steam Deck. I love it because the important part is set and forget it, and the part I tinker with is separate from the part that keeps things running. And if an update borks something, you can just revert to the image you came from.
fedora has a reputation for being bleeding edge for red hat based distros and atomic is an extension of that bleeding edge but in a particular way; i’ve been considering it myself because their atomic releases use rpm-ostree and i’m hoping that it provides some easy answers for package management.
Bluefin and all the Universal Blue spins are atomic, based on Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue. Atomic or immutable being the big difference from normal Fedora. The Ublue spins just add onto the base atmoic distros with extra compatibility mostly.
You can simply rebase with atomic fedora. No need to reinstall when switching atomic distros
Bluefin/Bazzite/Aurora are immutable, atomic versions of Fedora. I’ll probably explain it wrong but they’re more secured than normal Linux flavors and you get several copies of your core system files, so when you inevitably fuck something up, you roll back to the previous version and undo your mistake.
I’ve only just moved over to Bazzite in the last 6 months or so, so I’m no expert, but it’s been a cinch to get most games running.