Whelp, here I am. Been an Arch user for over 10 years now, and to this date I love it. But something is bothering me lately. Almost two years ago I jumped ship and completely switched to Wayland (using Plasma first, then Sway). I tasted modernism with all its features and it was sweet. But those last two years were a timeframe where I had to troubleshoot quite a lot compared to before where I used XFCE which was a very stable and reliant experience.
I am at a stage in my life where I do not have the time, nor the energy anymore to troubleshoot problems on a regular basis. I am now almost afraid of installing updates, because something new could fail again. But I cannot go back anymore. Wayland is too sweet.
So although I still love Arch, maybe it is time for me to look for something else which gives me more ease-of-mind. I am specifically looking at immutable distros now since the concept seems to be exactly what I am looking for (stable, low maintenance, up-to-date packages, easy rollback). But I am a bit lost with the options and hope that you can help me with some recommendations.
- I mainly browse the web, watch movies, game, do some scripting and run qemu VMs
- I am comfortable with the terminal
- I don’t do fancy customizations
- I don’t like GNOME
Distributions that I find interesting so far:
- Aurora
- Bazzite
- NixOS
I am still trying to wrap my head around what the differences between NixOS and the other two are. Afaik, with Nix you can configure your system once (including what packages you want to use), save this configuration in a file, and load it up whenever I need to set it up again. And it seems to have the same concept of updates, such that you can easily roll back if needed. But it seems to be aimed more at professional users and that I might overshoot at what I was aiming for. So for someone who likes to setup a system once and then just wants to use it indefinitely without too much maintenance what would your recommendation/advice/critisism regarding my situation be?
Edit: thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
Thank you for your suggestion! Yes, NixOS seems a bit too much.
Atomic Kinoite really looks very similar to Aurora. Is there any benefit of one over another?
Aurora is going to come setup with things like non-free codecs, distrobox, rocm stuff. It’ll make life a bit simpler.
Sounds good! Bazzite seems to be very similar, just with more gaming related stuff pre-installed.
It’s all part of the same project, Universal Blue.
Aurora -desktop KDE
Bluefin - desktop Gnome
Bazzite - gaming and handheld focused with KDE
I installed Bazzite on a desktop I recently gave away to some local people. I also used Bazzite for two years as a htpc before I got a steam deck. It was good stuff, never had problems with it.
Is there a guide to all the different Universal Blue spins anywhere?
Their website has a rundown of each, links to each projects page, and notes on what makes ublue different.
https://universal-blue.org/
But ignore all the “cloud native” talk. It’s got nothing to do with end user experience and I don’t know why they still feel the need to highlight it.
So from there I can see
and then this link which has
Does that sound like all of them?
Only those first 4 are within the ublue project. The others are just part of Fedora, different variations of Fedora immutable distro.
A ublue can be rebased to the Fedora images. So you could go from having Aurora to having Kinoite for example.
That repository of images you linked to you can get from the project pages. Like the Bazzite page will say “are you on handheld?”, “do you need game mode?” “Do you have nvidia?” And then link you to the appropriate version from that repository.
There might be deprecated versions in there, for example I know they don’t maintain the Surface kernel version anymore.
Ah OK, so what’s the difference between uBlue and the other fedora atomic distros? Just different people and a different arrangement of pre-installed stuff?
I’ll answer my own question: there’s plenty more here