this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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I can wholeheartly recommend you either Bazzite or Aurora / Bluefin.
All three are pretty much the exact same under the hood (Fedora Atomic). They are from the uBlue-Project and focus A LOT on user friendliness, hardware enablement and a "boring" (just works) experience.
Bazzite is more meant for gaming, and Aurora and Bluefin are more for general use, but you can of course use them totally interchangeably. You can even try out one, and if you don't like it as much, you can rebase to another variant with just one command.
The cool thing about them is that the Nvidia drivers are already baked into the image if you choose the Nvidia option on the download page.
This means, that you probably won't encounter any breakages, and even if you do, you don't have to fix them on your own. If your setup breaks, every one else's will break too, because the non-user-facing part of the OS is the same everywhere, and the devs will fix it very rapidly. In the meantime, you can just select the image from yesterday, where everything still worked, and continue with your stuff for the next few hours :)
I've never encountered such a chill distro in my Linux journey yet!
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'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.
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 use Aurora (the KDE version) as a software dev/ gaming machine. It’s great!
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.