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Don’t go straight to immutable Linux.

My first foray into Linux was through what you’d refer to as immutable Linux; shortly after the release of Fedora Kinoite. I’m literally the embodiment of the antithesis to your statement.

It is very new

This is factually true. So I can’t simply deny that. But being more precise is helpful:

• Fedora Atomic, the family of distros that enable uBlue, has been in the works since 2014. This eventually culminated into the release of Fedora Atomic Workstation in 2018, which was the name of Fedora Silverblue before the name change.
• The first commit of uBlue as a project happened over three years ago.
• The 1.0 release of Bazzite happened over a year ago.
• By contrast, Linux Mint has been out since 2006.

and I don’t like the focus.

Could you be more elaborate 😜?

First step: Decide on the so-called desktop environment. A shortlist is provided below. For a new user, this should be decisive when choosing between beginner-friendly distros.

Before going over to the next (and final) step, we need to set the stage for our contenders:

• Versions of Linux Mint. Linux Mint has (rightfully so) become the face of Linux for beginners. Stand out feature would be how crazy popular it is; it’s a joy to look up your problem through a search engine and find solutions for it.
• Images of uBlue. Where Linux Mint tries to smooth the rough edges of the “traditional Linux model” as nicely as possible, uBlue’s images can be referred to as revolutionary by comparison. The model strikes some (re)semblance to what you might know from your phone or chromebook. These images aren’t even close to reaching their full potential, but have already garnered/amassed a wide audience for how they (at least attempt to) solve some of Desktop Linux’ long-standing issues. Note that finding solutions for your problems might not be as straightforward. However, documentation is decent and they’ve been very helpful on Discord.

Final step: Pick the distro corresponding to your preferred desktop environment. The list found below (ordered alphabetically) isn’t trying to be exhaustive on desktop environments.

• Cinnamon; Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. This is their flagship and probably what people mean when referring to Linux Mint.
• GNOME; Bazzite’s GNOME. If you don’t intend to game, then consider Bluefin instead.
• KDE Plasma; Bazzite’s KDE Plasma. If you don’t intend to game, then consider Aurora instead.
• MATE; Linux Mint MATE Edition.
• Xfce; Linux Mint Xfce Edition.

Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it’s like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!

Great response! Much appreciated!

Interesting. Have you also tried openSUSE Aeon(/Kalpa)? Though I assume you’re a KDE user and thus waiting for Kalpa to become mature before a test ride.

Could you elaborate on what you didn’t like about Aurora and Bazzite; especially about how that experience made you more appreciative of openSUSE?

Thank you in advance!

What distro do you use

I daily drive secureblue.

and why?

Long story short; I love me some security. Unfortunately, My device is far from ideal for running Qubes OS. From within the remaining options, secureblue comes out on top for me.

Options include:

• Installing them through brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin.
• Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
• Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing nix to this effect.
• If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through rpm-ostree.

the fact that Fedora is the only (at the least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.

AFAIK, openSUSE Aeon(/Kalpa) does as well*.

Thank you for the kind words 😊!

Though, in retrospect, I hope the recommendation for Linux Mint works out for their issues regarding ACPI power states. Perhaps a bigger departure from Ubuntu (if at all) would have been beneficial here.

Yup; at least to some extent.

I don’t know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).

A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.

Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.

For Fedora specifically, people couldn’t regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.

Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it’s not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don’t think it has even peaked yet.

Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam’s chart -in which ProtonDB’s data is used- does indicate to this as well.

Just my 2 cents.

My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy.

So we have a bias towards Debian-based distros.

it’s not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn’t reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc).

However, a newer kernel is definitely preferred.

is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain.

And finally, healthy access to documentation.

Based on the above, I would not pick:

• Debian Stable or any distro based on it. They ship with the 6.1 kernel, which launched only a couple months (January 2023) after the launch of Zen 4 (September 2022). I’m aware that access to newer kernels is possible. However, at that point, why even bother with Debian Stable to begin with?
• While both of Debian’s Testing and Sid/Unstable branches have access to newer kernels from the get-go, distros that ship the latest kernel by default (e.g. Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives) are simply better for offering an end-user product.
• Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives are primarily dismissed for not being based on Debian. Though, the fact that they’re more towards the rolling release side of things does play a minor role as well. By their very nature, they will change. Hence it’s less ideal for “set-and-forget” setups.
• Pop_OS!’ team seems to be primarily focused on delivering their upcoming COSMIC DE. For this reason, the distro has been in relative limbo. Therefore, I can’t recommend it.
• TUXEDO OS is dismissed for being relatively unpopular. Lots of other Debian(/Ubuntu) derivatives are dismissed for various reasons.

Let’s get to the actual recommendation, Linux Mint seems to be tailor-made for your use case:

• Based on Ubuntu, but without Snaps. While you can choose to use Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) instead, that one doesn’t come with the latest kernel. So the recommendation is for (standard/vanilla) Linux Mint.
• Their forums are full with up-to-date and (relatively) well-written guides; while the excellent ArchWiki is arguably better, Linux Mint isn’t a slouch either. Furthermore, as Linux Mint is very popular, you can simply expect to find solutions to most things that might come up.

I had something similar going on in Fedora Silverblue. I didn’t really want to fiddle with it at the moment, so I just uninstalled whatever I got from ProtonVPN and the update went smooth afterwards. I hope someone else can point you towards a better answer.

Quite the contrary, the commit log on Github looks pretty healthy.

On what did you base the following:

it has not been updated since a while.

You can still edit it. Please consider doing so 😅.

should I be looking at any other distros?

From what I can tell,

• containerization is appealing to you; almost all of them employ this to some degree, but some more than others. More on that later.
• your preference goes out to (closer to) stock experiences rather than opinionated ones

I take it that you’d rather stick to the (relatively-speaking) more popular options. Not that popularity is necessarily good, rather not used by anyone else is bad.

Then, the following are worth looking at as well:

• NixOS; it’s quite different to all the others, perhaps we may call it obtuse by comparison. But, it has been going at it for the longest; heck, it’s older than Ubuntu. And, in my humble opinion, is one of the main inspirations for the others. But, contrary to the likes of Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS, it doesn’t go all-in on OCI. Therefore, it might not be as smooth of a transition.
• Guix System; the answer to “What if we had FSF-compliant NixOS, but with actually good documentation?” Jokes aside, this is a cool and underrated distro.
• openSUSE Aeon; relatively new still, but perhaps already offers the most secure OOTB experience. However, from what I can tell, in terms of transition to OCI, it doesn’t strive to be very revolutionary (as of yet). Fedora Atomic seems to be a relatively significant (and IMO exciting) departure from traditional Fedora. By contrast, openSUSE Aeon seems more like a _revolution with a (very) small r. Though, one may argue this is mostly due to maturity. Consider openSUSE Kalpa if you’re feeling particularly adventurous.
• uBlue’s base images; Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin are built from these. These are vanilla images with only hardware enablement, codecs, other RPM Fusion goodies and more that anyone installing Fedora Atomic would want on their systems anyways.
• Create your own; See this link if you know how to write containerfiles. See this link if you prefer yaml (.yml to be more precise) instead. The previous links were more focused on Fedora Atomic, this link offers Vanilla OS’ answer.

Other distros found on lists like this one didn’t make the cut for various reasons; sometimes it’s just because I haven’t heard enough of it.

Do I need to shift my expectations of an immutable distro even more?

Uhmm…, I don’t know exactly what your expectations are 😜.

FWIW, from what I gather, either (something based on) Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS should be right up your alley.

Important elaboration. Much appreciated.

I’m mostly oblivious of what’s required to run an ISP. But you mentioned servers yourself. Do you install Linux Mint on your servers?

Fair. Even if some may dismiss it as anecdotal (N=1), I do think it’s valuable. Thank you.