pyssla

One was it being immutable, meaning for any software that wasn’t in the flatpak store, I have to spin up a container running a mutable version and use that.

Sorry for being that guy, but please allow me to nitpick the above:

• Bazzite’s founder and lead maintainer doesn’t refer to Bazzite as immutable^[1].
• Bazzite supports a lot more than just Flatpak and pet containers. And that list isn’t even complete.

my only real point is that looking problems up on a small distro is harder

While I agree that Aurora definitely is a small ‘distro’^[2], I’m not comfortable to refer to Bazzite as a small project. Both Steam’s own metrics as well as ProtonDB’s suggest that it holds a moderate chunk. Sure, with just over 25k users it isn’t quite comparable to (say) Fedora’s 300k+ user base. But it definitely ain’t a slouch either.

As for the looking problems up part, honestly, if a quick search doesn’t help ya, you should just go over to their Discord or Discourse and ask the friendly maintainers and community for help/support. Heck, even their subreddit seems to be doing a commendable job.

but I guess its a rather small distro that not many people know?

It’s true that it’s not as well-established as many of the other distros discussed here; it probably has like 1k users or so. Which is quite literally just a small fraction of Fedora KDE’s over a 120k user base. Granted, it’s a relatively new distro built on Fedora’s latest/‘future’ tech. Usage numbers should follow eventually^[1].

Thankfully, that same tech enables Aurora (and other projects like it) to be very robust and reliable; tangibly more so than the more popular ‘traditional’ alternatives. I assume you’ll come to cherish and value this reliability, especially as stability seems to be a concern of yours.

This was originally intended as a longer comment, but the previous draft unfortunately blinked out of existence… Though, I’m more than willing to shed some light on the distros discussed below if you’re interested.

Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.

I’m surprised that no one else has mentioned them yet. Thus, for the sake of completeness, consider Aurora and Bazzite. It’s what I would personally install/recommend for/to relatives/friends that would like to make the switch to Linux.

Thank you for the quick response!

I don’t know if raw package counts is the best comparison.

You’re probably right. Do you think we got anything better to go by?

Unlike say Fedora, Arch bundles everything related to a project in the same file. If you want Qt6-base on Arch, that is one package. If you want it on Fedora, it is going to have a lib, header, docs, and maybe a few other packages.

Can’t comment on this. Though, the list of packages with qt6 in their name is considerably longer in Fedora. However, I wonder if this simply reflects that Fedora, by virtue of having a larger repository, also has more stuff related to qt6. Or, as you posited it, chooses to package the same content over multiple packages instead of bundling them like it’s supposedly happening on Arch.

Just from personal experience, I do not have issues with finding packages in the main repos, with only a handful of my packages coming from the AUR. This is not the case with others, like Fedora where extra repos need to be added, like EPEL and RPM Fusion.

Hmm…, I feel you might be conflating stuff. Please allow me to elaborate on what I mean.

Fedora is not able to include some packages in its own repository due to legal reasons. As such, these are relayed to RPM Fusion instead. Which means that a well-functioning Fedora installation (almost necessarily) desires to install some packages from RPM Fusion. So, RPM Fusion exists as a ‘hack’ of sorts to protect Fedora from legal charges and NOT because they’re too lazy (or something) to ship those packages themselves. To be clear, RPM Fusion is accepted as a trusted third-party repository.

Arch, on the other hand, is rather lenient on what they can include in their repositories. Basically enabling them to package within their repositories all codecs and whatnot without them being visibly worried about the legal consequences of this ordeal.

To be honest, I don’t know exactly where this discrepancy comes from. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to how Arch is basically a genuine community distro while Fedora has official ties to Red Hat.

Btw, small correction, AFAIK you’re not supposed to install packages from the EPEL on Fedora. Perhaps you meant COPR (basically Fedora’s AUR) or Terra instead?

The arch maintainers package more software than most other distributions.

Sorry, but I fail to see this.

I suppose if you’re accounting literally all independent distros, then you’re probably right. However, if we’d be more realistic and compare it to other well-established independent distros^[1], then we notice that the vastness of the packages found in Arch’s repository is rather lackluster at the very least. Heck, by virtually all metrics, Arch together with its derivatives undoubtedly belong in the upper echelons of usage stats; only being second to the Debian-family of distros. IMO, however, the size of its repository absolutely doesn’t reflect this; as it’s only bigger than Slackware, Solus and Void. The inclusion of these smaller projects is arguably charitable on my side*. But to drive the point home very clearly: Arch’s repository is smaller than Alpine’s, Debian’s, Fedora’s, openSUSE’s and Gentoo’s with a ratio of (about) two to one (except for openSUSE).

I use secureblue, because it offers the (AFAIK unique) intersection between:

• a security-first^[1] approach while being fit for general computing
• a first-class citizen of the ‘immutable’ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm
• a well-maintained project with many active contributors that exhibit a proactive stance when it comes to implementing (security) improvements

Idk about the browser thing it was because the kde wallet or something? It stores passwords and the browser has a login so it would force me to do that every time. Same with email and such, very annoying. I think I have it all working fine now.

Ah okay, thanks for the clarification! I have heard of that interaction elsewhere. Unsure if it’s KDE Plasma misbehaving or otherwise. Regardless, I’m glad to hear that you were able to resolve the issue. I did find this discussion (which you may have found yourself as well). In their case, they (somehow) didn’t properly create an account, which opens multiple can of worms you’d much rather not deal with. Thankfully, the fact that you were able to deal with the problem suggests that you should be fine 😉.

Sorry for being that guy…, but, if this was meant as a general statement, i.e. Flatpak is currently incapable of PipeWire and necessarily forces PulseAudio on its current audience, then that’s a false statement. I understand the confusion though; we don’t find a toggle for PipeWire (within Flatseal or otherwise) while we do for PulseAudio. To expose PipeWire to a flatpak, add xdg-run/pipewire-0:ro right under “Other files” within the “Filesystem” section of Flatseal. Note that the :ro-part is probably not needed and perhaps even undesirable at times. Finally, note that this doesn’t always work; some stuff simply don’t seem to support this yet.

Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.

On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:

• care-free updates
• repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
• rewards effort put into initial setup

Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.

Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.

If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix^[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.

Thanks for reporting back!

Pretty good so far

Glad to hear that it has been a pleasant experience overall!

few things took a while to figure out …

The “force me to enter a password any time I open my browser”-thing seems like unintended behavior. Pretty strange. Glad to hear that it has been resolved, though.

sadly still one thing I probably won’t ever be able to fix is getting a program (combat mode for GW2) to actually work as it’s… like 13 years old and just lets me press a button to make my mouse left/right click into keys while the game is up. They have integrated the other functionality of it at least so it’s not THAT bad. Might be able to get my mouse to manually do that if I check out the drivers for it I think someone made.

Perhaps you’ve already undertaken what I’m about to say, so please feel free to ignore this if that’s the case: Have you reached out to their Discord server in hopes of resolving the issue? While their documentation is pretty great, it’s possible that it ain’t sufficient. Whenever that happens, the Discord community can (and probably will (at least in my experience)) step up and provide excellent guidance when prompted.

What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control.

While I don’t completely agree on flexibility, I can at least understand where you’re coming from; there’s simply stuff you can do on traditional distros that have yet to be properly supported on the ‘immutables’. However, even after giving it some genuine thought, I still don’t quite understand how control is sacrificed. Would you mind elaborating?

Honestly, Bazzite seems to fit like a glove:

• RTX 3070Ti

Nvidia can be an ass to work with on a lot of distros, but Bazzite delivers the right drivers OOTB.

Needs:

• Gaming

Bazzite is setup for gaming OOTB; it’s bundled with Steam and Lutris, makes use of custom kernels/schedulers to optimize performance for gaming and contains many other goodies like excellent controller/peripheral support.

• Coding (Mostly python)

Provides a specialized DX (i.e. Developer Experience) image that comes with all the goodies you might expect.

• Video editing

Has a built-in just script that downloads, installs and sets up Davinci Resolve for ya: ujust install-resolve

• Music composing

This is the only I’m not 100% sure yet because you haven’t provided explicitly yet what you’d like to use. But, I can’t image it would be harder to get this running on Bazzite compared to other distros.

And last, but not least:

I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance

Through utilizing the bootc model, Bazzite is as low maintenance as they come.

It has been my pleasure fam! Enjoy your ride on Bazzite and please consider reporting back on how it went 😉.

I get the impression you’ve been enticed/subjected to some confusing technical jargon without noticing. Please allow me to shed some light.

Idk, there so much “mint and Debian are stable” but like… what’s the even mean?

Stable can mean a bunch of different stuff that may or may not be closely related. In the case of Debian, it’s the name of its default release; the one in which packages are frozen for two years except for security patches. (Note that this naming scheme is not unique to Debian.) As such, a Debian installation will be unchanging for these two years, earning its stable designation (which, to be clear, just meaning unchanging in this context). Finally, this unchanging environment should provide a ton of stability (i.e. stuff just works), which is also referred to as stable. These three distinct meanings of stable are probably the ones you’ll come across the most.

Is fedora 42 or bazzite going to be crashing regularly? Cuz… I doubt it?

The bold part is a clear demonstration that you understood stable to mean strictly robust; i.e. the third meaning discussed above. And to be clear, Fedora does a decent job at providing a reliable experience. (Bazzite even more so.) But not all three meanings of stable apply to it:

• For Fedora (and thus Bazzite by extension), the only stable repository is the one used to create its ISOs (i.e. the images used for installation). Beyond this, some packages are frozen within a release/version; e.g. you’ll never get a major release update for GNOME unless you do a major release update for Fedora. But…, that’s basically it; (almost) all other packages receive regular updates. As such, Fedora is often referred to as a semi-rolling release distro instead (as opposed to Debian being referred to as a stable release distro). So, to be clear, Fedora and Bazzite are NOT stable in this context.
• As (most of) its packages receive regular updates, it isn’t unchanging either. And thus, NOT stable in this context as well.
• However, in terms of offering a robust/reliable experience, Fedora is pretty good. Bazzite is even better due to its atomicity^[1] and the superior distro-management allowed by the bootc model.

So, to answer your question, Fedora and Bazzite will not crash regularly. And, while Fedora might fall a little short of providing as robust of an experience as you might find on Debian and Linux Mint (assuming you won’t FrankenDebian your installs), Bazzite may actually rival (and perhaps even eclipse/surpass) Debian and Linux Mint in this respect.

Seems easier to just go with fedora 42 or bazzite or whatever

For your purposes, I agree that going for the Bazzite-route seems to be the easiest.

but now idk what bazzite being immutable even means for what I can’t change and why that’s a big deal so idk.

This is a nuanced discussion that probably deserves more attention, but I’ll keep it short for the sake of brevity. In Bazzite’s case, strictly-speaking, immutability refers to how most of /usr’s content isn’t supposed to be changed deliberately by you. This is enforced by the system (in part) by making those files read-only.

In practice, though, there’s very little you actually can’t do with the system:

• AFAIK, you’re forced to use GRUB; which AFAIK is the most used bootloader anyways. Here’s a thread discussing support for systemd-boot.
• No support for UKI at the moment. But progress on this has been accelerated (relatively) recently; a presentation from just two weeks ago about the subject matter.
• The situation around dkms/akmods still ain’t great and leaves a lot to be desired; you’re basically limited to the ones found here. Thankfully, this is something else that’s actively being worked on.
• While installing from Fedora’s repository through bootc/rpm-ostree is possible, it’s actually discouraged in Bazzite’s case. Thankfully, there’s a plethora of different means to the same end. Furthermore, sysext have come a long way and might become our go-to eventually.

It TDE secure (for personal use)?

Depends on your threat modeling. Though, unfortunately, none of the DEs/WMs on Linux offer perfect security; this even applies to a hardened distro like secureblue.

So, practically-speaking, it probably ain’t great. But we aren’t used to great anyways 😅.

A bit of tinkering. Thoughts?

Obligatory “There is not a single distro that’s the absolute best for each and every one.” disclaimer aside, my personal favorite is definitely secureblue for being a hardened-by-default distro that adheres to the ‘immutable’ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm while enjoying a healthy stream of improvements pushed out by an active group of contributors.