Windows 10 is close to being dead now, with support ending this year. So why not try out Linux? Instead of getting a whole new system and having to deal with the increasing amount of AI junk and adverts in Windows 11.
Tried using Alma on my rig at home (since I’m using it on my servers), and I’m already going to be looking for a new distro. Went back to it after a week or so not having the energy to deal with it and apps like Firefox and steam wouldn’t launch.
Need to find a decent OS to run in its place so I can stop booting to Win10
Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It’s upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you’re used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I’ve been extremely happy with it.
Funny you mention that, Silver blue was the first thing I tried (because I’ve used fedora off and on for over a decade) and something about it just didn’t work for me, but I don’t remember what. Didn’t try the regular version tho.
In the end, I want something I can game on and dev with (which is the easy part, since VSCodium is multiplatform). If Steam doesn’t work, the install is getting torched (which is why Alma is getting the boot).
I’m a sys admin by trade, so the OS should require minimal troubleshooting because I’m sick of doing that by the end of the day.
Silverblue is a totally different beast than what you’re used to. The filesystem is immutable with the exception of /var and /etc. Even /home is moved into /var/home, although a bind mount exists so /home still appears to be there. You are expected to use flatpaks for applications, toolbox for rpms that don’t have a flatpak, and very last resort you can overlay an rpm on the base image. I absolutely think this is the direction linux as a whole is moving. OpenSUSE has MicroOS that does a similar thing and Leap 16 will default to being immutable. Debian has an immutable variant, and SteamOS is built on an immutable flavor of Arch. The Fedora Atomic family specifically supports bootc. You are essentially booting a container as your OS. That’s why it has so much community buy in. You could try looking at the Universal Blue images I mentioned. Bazzite is gaming focused with the option to boot straight into gaming mode, Aurora is a general workstation with KDE, and Bluefin is a general workstation based on GNOME. Each image has a DX version that includes developer tools like VScode and Virtual Machine Manager included.
I’m also a sysad by trade. A consultant for Red Hat. I personally switched to Aurora DX and the only overlayed package I have installed is clevis-dracut so network based disk encryption with tang works. Other than that I have the built-in stuff, flatpaks (Steam is installed this way), and a couple of utilities installed with brew (btop, nvtop). I also don’t want to manage the OS. Getting the OS updates as an atomic image is very appealing. OStree also allows you to rollback if an update does fail for some reason… Doing it this way makes your OS kind of an appliance that you run applications on top of instead of alongside.
Damn, that’s a hell of a high effort response, thank you for the info!
I’ll try another SilverBlue install, probably a bluefin variant you mentioned. It definitely sounds like I need to unlearn a lot of the info I’ve picked up over the years, including avoiding flat packs (or was that snap?). Not sure what toolbox is, but I expect I’ll have to look into that in due time.
The biggest downside to Flatpaks is that they’re kind of containers. That’s obviously also they’re biggest upside. But with that isolation comes some bloat compared to rpms directly installed, some don’t integrate as cleanly with the host OS, etc… The Universal Blue images ship with Flatseal and Warehouse which help manage those Flatpaks. For example, if you want to add an external library to the Steam Flatpak, you can use Flatseal to allow the Steam Flatpak to access that directory. By default Steam sandboxes itself to just its own ~/.var area.
A word on toolbox. It’s really cool and it comes with Fedora Atomic spins. However, it was forked and the fork is called distrobox and is miles better. So much better that it’s my opinion that we at Red Hat should deprecate toolbox and just embrace distrobox. What is it? It’s really just a wrapper for podman. It sets up containers to act kind of, sort of like VMs or LXC system containers, but it mounts your home directory inside the container. You can share apps between the distrobox and the host. The idea is that you can create a distrobox for whatever thing you’re doing, install all of that thing’s dependencies, and work from your home directory, but never actually touch your host installation. Kind of like a devcontainer for your system.
Snap is the one we poo poo. Canonical is always going to Canonical. Just like when they tried to make the Unity desktop (which I actually preferred) and the Mir compositor, the community had already settled on GNOME 3 and Wayland. This is sort of snap vs flatpak. Last I knew snap used a proprietary, hosted by Canonical, backend. That’s a big no from me. I’m not staunchly open source or nothing, but there is just no reason for Canonical to be making proprietary anything.
If you can’t tell, I’m stoked about the immutable future of Linux.
I’ve layered zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting and syncthing. The first three because the version from homebrew behaved weird, syncthing because I’ve got two users on this computer and systemctl enable syncthing@user is easier than dealing with podman containers right now.
Any reason to go vanilla Debian and not a Debian based system like Ubuntu? I’m not looking to do much advanced on my desktop other than maybe some docker/bash/Powershell development, gaming, and basic browsing.
I definitely am attracted to ‘it just works’, but I also want to make sure I’m not handcuffing myself with an os that makes it hard to play with it as well. I know those are at two ends of a spectrum, but worst case I have plenty of VMs to use to play if necessary.
“It just works” is why Linus Torvalds uses Fedora and not Debian. Just saying… Debian does a lot of weird hand holding and many packages come with pre-configured pieces rather than what the developer pushed. They’re usually sensible, but if you don’t know it’s doing that it can be strange. For example, fail2ban on Debian will come with an SSH jail pre-configured. That is what most people use it for, but IMO it’s kind of weird that someone made that decision for you on an app that isn’t pre-installed.
In the defense of Debian vs Ubuntu, Debian won’t force snaps on you.
And to be clear. I’m not going to say Debian is not without it’s flaws. It is the system you choose if all you care about is stability. Case in point, I work with Linux day in and day out for my job, the absolute last thing I want to do is tinker with my laptop when I’m not at work - so I picked Debian. For me, the absolute stability is the most important thing - for others the fact that software can come preconfigured or is just old will be deal breakers.
As for Ubuntu vs Debian - ultimately they are similar. However Ubuntu has made some (IMO) choices I dislike (eg snaps).
If all you care about is stability, check my other comments about the Fedora Atomic family. Hard to be more stable than immutable with built-in rollback capabilities. That’s why I currently run Aurora DX.
Also a lot harder to wrap your head around atomic distros when your first playing with Linux. Windows > a traditional distro (even arch) is a lot more similar then making the switch to an immutable distro.
That might be a good selling point of Debian, if you never try anything advanced with it. I wanted to get GPU passthrough working on Debian with qemu, and it was such a pain trying to get the packages that Debian didn’t come with. Had to add new apt repositories, started messing up the boot cycle, and I eventually just gave up.
Tried using Alma on my rig at home (since I’m using it on my servers), and I’m already going to be looking for a new distro. Went back to it after a week or so not having the energy to deal with it and apps like Firefox and steam wouldn’t launch.
Need to find a decent OS to run in its place so I can stop booting to Win10
Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It’s upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you’re used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I’ve been extremely happy with it.
Funny you mention that, Silver blue was the first thing I tried (because I’ve used fedora off and on for over a decade) and something about it just didn’t work for me, but I don’t remember what. Didn’t try the regular version tho.
In the end, I want something I can game on and dev with (which is the easy part, since VSCodium is multiplatform). If Steam doesn’t work, the install is getting torched (which is why Alma is getting the boot).
I’m a sys admin by trade, so the OS should require minimal troubleshooting because I’m sick of doing that by the end of the day.
Silverblue is a totally different beast than what you’re used to. The filesystem is immutable with the exception of /var and /etc. Even /home is moved into /var/home, although a bind mount exists so /home still appears to be there. You are expected to use flatpaks for applications, toolbox for rpms that don’t have a flatpak, and very last resort you can overlay an rpm on the base image. I absolutely think this is the direction linux as a whole is moving. OpenSUSE has MicroOS that does a similar thing and Leap 16 will default to being immutable. Debian has an immutable variant, and SteamOS is built on an immutable flavor of Arch. The Fedora Atomic family specifically supports bootc. You are essentially booting a container as your OS. That’s why it has so much community buy in. You could try looking at the Universal Blue images I mentioned. Bazzite is gaming focused with the option to boot straight into gaming mode, Aurora is a general workstation with KDE, and Bluefin is a general workstation based on GNOME. Each image has a DX version that includes developer tools like VScode and Virtual Machine Manager included.
I’m also a sysad by trade. A consultant for Red Hat. I personally switched to Aurora DX and the only overlayed package I have installed is
clevis-dracutso network based disk encryption with tang works. Other than that I have the built-in stuff, flatpaks (Steam is installed this way), and a couple of utilities installed with brew (btop, nvtop). I also don’t want to manage the OS. Getting the OS updates as an atomic image is very appealing. OStree also allows you to rollback if an update does fail for some reason… Doing it this way makes your OS kind of an appliance that you run applications on top of instead of alongside.Damn, that’s a hell of a high effort response, thank you for the info!
I’ll try another SilverBlue install, probably a bluefin variant you mentioned. It definitely sounds like I need to unlearn a lot of the info I’ve picked up over the years, including avoiding flat packs (or was that snap?). Not sure what toolbox is, but I expect I’ll have to look into that in due time.
The biggest downside to Flatpaks is that they’re kind of containers. That’s obviously also they’re biggest upside. But with that isolation comes some bloat compared to rpms directly installed, some don’t integrate as cleanly with the host OS, etc… The Universal Blue images ship with Flatseal and Warehouse which help manage those Flatpaks. For example, if you want to add an external library to the Steam Flatpak, you can use Flatseal to allow the Steam Flatpak to access that directory. By default Steam sandboxes itself to just its own ~/.var area.
A word on toolbox. It’s really cool and it comes with Fedora Atomic spins. However, it was forked and the fork is called distrobox and is miles better. So much better that it’s my opinion that we at Red Hat should deprecate toolbox and just embrace distrobox. What is it? It’s really just a wrapper for podman. It sets up containers to act kind of, sort of like VMs or LXC system containers, but it mounts your home directory inside the container. You can share apps between the distrobox and the host. The idea is that you can create a distrobox for whatever thing you’re doing, install all of that thing’s dependencies, and work from your home directory, but never actually touch your host installation. Kind of like a devcontainer for your system.
Snap is the one we poo poo. Canonical is always going to Canonical. Just like when they tried to make the Unity desktop (which I actually preferred) and the Mir compositor, the community had already settled on GNOME 3 and Wayland. This is sort of snap vs flatpak. Last I knew snap used a proprietary, hosted by Canonical, backend. That’s a big no from me. I’m not staunchly open source or nothing, but there is just no reason for Canonical to be making proprietary anything.
If you can’t tell, I’m stoked about the immutable future of Linux.
I’ve layered zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting and syncthing. The first three because the version from homebrew behaved weird, syncthing because I’ve got two users on this computer and
systemctl enable syncthing@useris easier than dealing with podman containers right now.It’s a different family then what you have been playing with, but if you want “just works and not fancy” - Debian.
It won’t have the latest and greatest software (security patches sure but nothing else). You trade that for stability.
Any reason to go vanilla Debian and not a Debian based system like Ubuntu? I’m not looking to do much advanced on my desktop other than maybe some docker/bash/Powershell development, gaming, and basic browsing.
I definitely am attracted to ‘it just works’, but I also want to make sure I’m not handcuffing myself with an os that makes it hard to play with it as well. I know those are at two ends of a spectrum, but worst case I have plenty of VMs to use to play if necessary.
“It just works” is why Linus Torvalds uses Fedora and not Debian. Just saying… Debian does a lot of weird hand holding and many packages come with pre-configured pieces rather than what the developer pushed. They’re usually sensible, but if you don’t know it’s doing that it can be strange. For example, fail2ban on Debian will come with an SSH jail pre-configured. That is what most people use it for, but IMO it’s kind of weird that someone made that decision for you on an app that isn’t pre-installed.
In the defense of Debian vs Ubuntu, Debian won’t force snaps on you.
And to be clear. I’m not going to say Debian is not without it’s flaws. It is the system you choose if all you care about is stability. Case in point, I work with Linux day in and day out for my job, the absolute last thing I want to do is tinker with my laptop when I’m not at work - so I picked Debian. For me, the absolute stability is the most important thing - for others the fact that software can come preconfigured or is just old will be deal breakers.
As for Ubuntu vs Debian - ultimately they are similar. However Ubuntu has made some (IMO) choices I dislike (eg snaps).
If all you care about is stability, check my other comments about the Fedora Atomic family. Hard to be more stable than immutable with built-in rollback capabilities. That’s why I currently run Aurora DX.
Also a lot harder to wrap your head around atomic distros when your first playing with Linux. Windows > a traditional distro (even arch) is a lot more similar then making the switch to an immutable distro.
That might be a good selling point of Debian, if you never try anything advanced with it. I wanted to get GPU passthrough working on Debian with qemu, and it was such a pain trying to get the packages that Debian didn’t come with. Had to add new apt repositories, started messing up the boot cycle, and I eventually just gave up.