Yeah, but I have Alot of love, so it’s okay

It’s in my plan to switch, actually. The only reason I haven’t is because I need to make sure I know how to use certain Pipewire inputs with the window manager. I’ve seen that it does work, but I need to know how to do it myself before I make the switch.

Smithay, yes

On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.

This is where I would agree with you, except to clarify and say, “It depends.” There’s plenty to figure out, and there’s a lot you can learn about when it comes to understanding what layer(s) a piece of software runs in. A driven newbie could find it rewarding to figure out this new paradigm. I once read a post from someone who installed Aurora on a grandparent’s laptop, and the grandparent ran with it and learned how to use everything themselves. It’s good to know who the end user is.

It also highlights some of the pitfalls and old practices of relying upon sudo without good reason. Lots of software only needs to run in local userspace, for example, and devs should really take into consideration what permissions they actually need, rather than choosing what’s easiest and expedient.

And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake.

It’s not so much another layer but dividing the existing cake into very distinct layers. You have an immutable system layer, you have an app layer for apps that you apply with rpm-ostree, and you have the user layer where your Distroboxes and Flatpaks live.

The benefit of this structure is that you can swap out the system layer at will. In theory, you could swap from a Gnome-based system to a Niri-based one, and rather than keeping all the Gnome apps and settings, you now just have the Niri ones. This ability to swap out the system layer makes it so system updates are much safer and less prone to conflicts, and they’re much more scalable for large deployments.

But do read more about it. There’s pros and cons to it, and then you can really get into the weeds with bootc…

Do I think a newbie needs to know this stuff from the get go? Probably not. I think that particularly since atomic distros have been around for several years now, the Flatpak ecosystem has grown quite a bit. There’s a lot already there that will work for most people. There’s a possibility they would need to layer something within their first year (I needed Java, for example), but it’s not likely they’d need it often if at all.

If they can’t help but tinker or theme, though, I would steer them away from atomic distros entirely. As interesting as they are, they’re geared towards duplicability, not bespoke modifications. My daily desktop driver is CachyOS, and I tinker with that, but the laptop with Bazzite is one I need to have maximum uptime.

Ideally, you don’t. You can layer packages with rpm-ostree, but that’s typically something you want to do very intentionally and sparingly, not as a first resort for installing packages.

Instead, everything is typically installed in userspace via Flatpak/AppImage or using the distrobox command to create podman containers (where you can install software using its package manager, depending on what base distro you chose for it).

When you update, you are replacing the current system image with a new one, so if there’s a problem with the new system, you can just rpm-ostree rollback to the previous one.

Let me know if you have other questions. I run Bazzite on a laptop daily.

I’m currently learning about it, so I can’t offer much expertise, but if all else fails, look into Wireplumber; it sounds like it’s failing to make the proper node connections automatically.

I intentionally did not answer their question, because I don’t know. What I addressed was their misconception that Cosmic is based upon Gnome.

Cosmic runs its own window manager called cosmic-comp, whereas Gnome uses Mutter. The tiling is baked into the Cosmic window manager, whereas you’d need to use an extension to get the same functionality on Gnome.

Glad to hear you’re liking it, though! While I currently use Gnome with the PaperWM extension, Mutter is frustratingly behind on some current WM improvements (without good reason, IMO).

If you enjoy the tiling aspects, check out similar projects like Niri, as their window management shares some of the same codebase! Lots of neat projects out there, these days.

Neat. Seems like a cool project to keep an eye on.

Love it (CachyOS). For the most part, everything “just works.” I have no plans to go back—not even wishful musings.

There have been a few…let’s call them…stnanks.

• Not all of the sensors were recognized for my motherboard out of the box. The important ones, like basic CPU temp and a few others were fine, but more granular ones, like fan speed, T_junc, T_die, etc. were missing. I like to apply my own fan curves based on various sensor conditions, so this was a sticking point initially.
  • Thankfully, the Arch wiki and a thanklessly maintained dkms module for this specific (problematic) chipset came to my rescue. Pretty easy to get set up.
• A small number of very specific games and mods don’t work on Linux. If you exclusively play competitive online games, there’s a good chance you are going to be out of luck.
  • I have friends that play League, but I’m not willing to give up Linux just for that one game. Plenty of other multiplayer games out there that work just fine.
• Audio routing is both easier and more difficult.
  • There’s great GUIs to manage audio connections.
  • Trying to get automatic connections going, like with VoiceMeeter, is a lot more technical and involves learning Lua and Pipewire/Wireplumber. Not impossible, and audio tends to work just fine otherwise, but if you want a specific custom setup, it will take some effort.

Overall, I wouldn’t trade what I have for Microsoft any day of the week. I’m done being their product.

The ones I know aren’t at all, they’re just uninformed.

Depends on the project and the kind of utility I get from it. Up to $20 USD typically, but I’ve donated more for specific cases.

Probably true, but iirc, there are already people planning to keep X11 going, because change means fucking up their personal workflow.

Yeah, I even tried rolling my own downstream distro based on Bazzite by trying to install it at build time (when they do most of their system changes), but I kept running into trouble either with extracting the files or moving the files where they needed to go.

Oh, Private Internet Access. The way it installs itself is wonky on immutable systems (i.e. it was written for mutable systems in an odd way). I remember seeing someone say on the PIA GitHub that there’s a workaround, but I haven’t given that a go, and my own experience trying in the past still led to problems, even if you got the client and daemon working.

You can utilize the OpenVPN configs just fine, but you lose out on some nice features in the client, like WireGuard and some other QoL things.

I love them, too. Ironically, I’m not currently running one, but that’s more because I need a VPN client that I haven’t been able to get working on immutable distros, but I’d use one if I that was solved

I’m not familiar with this library or this dev, so I can’t say if this is intended or not. There’s plenty of bad actors out there who would love to get their hands on existing projects with a base of trust, which they can weaponize for their nefarious means.

I think everyone here has offered good advice, so I have nothing to add in that regard, but for the record, I fucked up a Debian bookworm install by doing a basic apt update && apt upgrade. The only “weird” software it had was Remmina, so I could remote into work; nothing particularly wild.

I recognize that Debian is supposed to be bulletproof, but I can offer commiseration that it can be just as fallible as any other base distro.

It’s probably still a good option if you don’t have a VPN, though.

…or they should just move to Linux, kill two birds and all that.

I like the idea of Portmaster, but it didn’t work with dynamically assigned VPN IPs when I used it a couple years ago. It’s also not easy to temporarily switch off; iirc, I had to uninstall everything to get my VPN to work again.

Unless they’ve figured out how to fix that issue, it’s a caveat anyone with a VPN should know about.