Yeah I totally understand that, I’ve played around with immutable distros inside virtual machines and they’re interesting. Also if you like tinkering, Linux is a great OS.

If you do go immutable have a play with KVM - Kernel Virtual Machines - they’re easy to set up and give near native speeds for guest virtual Linux machines (or decent performance for other OS like Windows) It’s a great way to play with Linux inside a sandbox while keeping your host clear; but also a very useful way to run custom software in a flexible Linux guest while on an immutable desktop. E.g. Create a Mint VM to run something that’d be a pain to set up on Silverblue.

Immutable desktop plus KVM guests might be the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t end up on immutable distro, KVM is cool tech that has really advanced in the last few years. It’s better and more powerful than VirtualBox imo, and I use it a lot even on my rolling release distro (I have a VM to run work Microsoft Office, plus a few Linux VMs for a torrent stack and just for tinkering).

So I’m a sceptic when it comes to immutable desktops. What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control. If you want to use software outside of Flatpak and your distros repos, immutable can be very annoying to work around.

If you want more control and flexibility, a standard install with a Long Term Support distro will be fine. I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed; I wouldn’t recommend that as it’s a rolling distro but I would recommend OpenSuSE Leap the point release distro. It has good user tools in YaST, it’s secure and it’s reliable, and it has a sensible update schedule. It is also a decent distro for coding. It has multiple versions of Python available which I believe are configured to coexist well, deliberately to make coding and version control easier.

I’d avoid anything directly Ubuntu related due to the reliance on Snap. But Linux Mint is a good variant which has loads of support available online if you want to ease back into Linux. Make no mistake, although it’s user friendly, it’s a full distro and capable of being as powerful as you want.

If you really do want to go down the immutable route, then probably Fedora Silver blue and variants is the way to go at the moment. I second the Kaionite recommendation - KDE is great. It’s well established and popular in the space, so there will more support out there should issues arise (most commonly installing something not in the repos and not on Flatpak). Immutable distros from other big names aren’t really there yet in terms of the user base as far as I’m aware.

Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. The fork Strawberry is a safer bet; actively maintained.

Elisa is a modern music player from the KDE project. It’s quite slick but not always the most intuitive - some options are hidden away in menus to keep the main interface slick.

It definitely has Repeat One.

Otherwise Strawberry is probably the best bet. It’s not the slickest looking in terms of modern UI design but it’s rock solid and still actively maintained. It’s basically the continuation of Clementine (which is largely untouched since 2016) which itself was a continuation of Amarok.

I like Strawberry but I do find the UI a bit jarring in the modern era. It’s feature rich and stable though.

I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

You can do lots of things with both, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

People have used Lutris for other apps because it was a more convenient wrapper for Wine than the defaults offered but it’s not primarily designed for it and support will be limited. Lutris is designed to be a games library and that’s it’s focus.

I personally wouldn’t recommend wine newbies to be using Lutris to run everything because if nothing else it would be annoying for the Lutris dev team to be dealing with “I can’t get Microsoft Word working”.

I also personally wouldn’t recommend Bottles for games because of all the other features Lutris offers. I have a huge library of games and I wouldn’t want to manage that in the Bottles interface. But I’m aware people use it for that and Lutris is one of its supported runners.

Bottles and Lutris complement each other and work together well. But lutris is designed to be a games libaray while Bottles is designed to be for everything.

I personally use Lutris for games (most of my wine use) and Bottles for a few other windows apps.

But the real star of the show is under the hood - it’s wine and Proton doing the heavy lifting. Lutris and Bottles are tools to get the most out of them and it’s choice which you use and how.

Lutris is for managing games, and can use multiple different engines. Proton is one, but also Linux native games, dos, ScummVM, etc. Lutris also interfaces with popular stores like Steam, Epic, GOG etc. It’s a game and gaming library tool.

Bottles is a general purpose wrapper for Wine. You can run games but also any wine software. It’s a general purpose wine tool.

Lutris makes running games in proton easy. Bottles makes running apps in wine easy.

Yeah I agree.

I also don’t like the green dots and new tags - I do see how it is reminiscent of the bloat on Windows start menus even if the motivation is very different. But if I recall they can be turned off so I’d don’t see the issue.

I’m also not a fan of someone donating €100 and then saying “I’ll donate another €100 if you remove this feature”.

There is an official Jellyfin plugin that adds DLNA support; content can then be accessed via any DLNA client including VLC (built in support). MPV can also use DLNA with it’s own plugin.

Some good advice already in this thread.

Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.

Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.

If you want to play with Atomic distros I’d recommend you do that in a virtual machine in KVM first. They are quite restricting which is good for the distro developers to make consistent releases and experiences for users, and secure, but not necessarily the best option for tech savvy users.

There are ways around the restrictions but you can reach points where the compromises you have to make are too frustrating. If you find that out late down the line after setting up your desktop it can be very annoying. Also I do use Flatpak, but it’s not the most efficient way to run software. Atomic distros have more overhead due to the need to use flatpaks or distrobox and the like to get everything you might want.

Atomic distros are a neat idea but I personally love tweaking every element of my install and optimising or customising it. So I use a rolling release distro, have my home folder on a separate partition, and back up regularly.

Kubuntu 24.10 is on plasma 6.1; not sure why you thought it was on plasma 5? Maybe you were thinking of the Long Term Support release which has a much longer release cycle and favours stability over cutting edge; that probably is still on 5? But personally I stay away from Ubuntu distros due to snap.

If you really want to learn Linux and game, maybe pick a distro that is not optimised by default for gaming and optimise it yourself?

I’m on OpenSuSE Tunbleweed and have optimised it myself to game how I want. It’s rolling release so I’m on KDE Plasma 6.4. It’s not difficult to do although I haven’t gone quite as far as kernel patching that the gaming focused distros offer.

Another challenge is Arch - it’s really not as difficult as people think and even just setting it up in a virtual machine helps you learn alot about Linux fundamentals without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve learnt alot using KVM to create virtual machines, and even have a Win 11 machine set up just because I can.

Another route to consider which I also do is get a SBC like a Raspberry 5 and look into setting up self hosting of services like Home Assistant etc. Again you learn Alot about how Linux works in the process and you can keep your main PC running for games without having to move. There is a whole self hosting community on Lemmy with loads of different routes to go, and lots of different manufacturers these days.

There are lots of options beyond changing distros. But also changing distros can be fun and a nice way to reset and make something new.

I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.

It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.

This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?

And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.

So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?

Gets mauled by a bear.

Yeah I have a 3070 and have experienced similar sorts of minor annoyances when using Wayland. When I see reports that issues are fixed I try a Wayland session and still find various oddities or issues.

They may be marginal useages but for me I have a dual screen set up and I might game on one and have a video open on another, or even have two video streams open, one on each screen. I find videos slow down and lag, or have artefacts. Issues I don’t get on X11 or when I was in windows.

I’m in the same position of looking to upgrade my graphics card and I’m looking at AMD to avoid any more Nvidia related issues. I love using Linux but I don’t want to be dealing with Nvidia drivers after past experience.

I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s overblown having put up with issues myself with a mainstream 3070 card. A year really isn’t very long and it’s been a series of issues for me. When I’ve seen reports that the issues are fixed I have tried Wayland sessions and still find basic problems like video lag on my dual 4k set up without any clear solution. I have an Nvidia GPU and I avoid Wayland as a result.

My feeling is that they’ve fixed the issues perhaps for most useage cases but not all, and it can be enough for just 1 unfixed issue to ruin your experience.

I have a 3070 and am Linux only now; I’m currently looking at an upgrade for my GPU and genuinely I’m not even looking at an Nvidia GPU such have the annoyances been with Nvidia and wayland support. Many people who want specific features of Nvidia cards may not be so lucky

Even if Wayland support is fixed, I’m in the category of once bite twice shy with Nvidia on linux.

I have a 3070 and generally I have no issues with gaming or working in X11.

I have previously had major issues with Nvidia and Wayland and I don’t use Wayland as a result on that machine . Many of those issues may have been resolved now but at present there isn’t a need to be using Wayland although it is being increasingly pushed. Problems I had were laggyness in the desktop, and videos becoming choppy if I had more than one major process running on the GPU (eg game and video in browser, or two browser windows both with video). I believe such issues have been fixed in the past 12-18m but I’m now in the habit of using X11 on the machine with no incentive to try Wayland again for now.

It is very easy to avoid Wayland - as simple as ensuring X11 is installed and then logging out of a Wayland desktop session and logging into an X11 session once and keeping with that as the default.

I do have a separate AMD machine with integrated GPU and that has been running Wayland from the get go. On that machine I’ve never even had to think about this issue and have just let my fedora based distro (Nobara) default to Wayland. It’s been very much an Nvidia issue.

There is quite a range of devices out there now with varying capabilites. Things like the Onion Omega2+, Oranage Pi, and more.

Raspberry Pi also remains good. While the Pi5 is expensive and more powerful - raspberry pi also makes the Pi Zero boards which are cheaper less capable boards which are closer to what the original raspberry Pi was but newer hardware.

I’d say the Pi5 is a heading more towards a full PC like device (hence the comparisons to cost and capability minipcs pepple are making in thia thread). But there remain plenty of lower spec machines out there now similar to the original cheap Raspberry Pi concept. And we’ve had high inflation recently - to some extent the cost perception avtually reflects money being worth less than it was and buying less for $10 or $20.

Laptops are not generally designed to run like that with a closed lid. Heat dissipation is designed around the idea the laptop is open and some of it is through the keyboard surface. The lid closed would change that.

Systems can of course be setup to power off the display but for server/service uses open laptops may not be efficient space wise.

Having said that if the scenario is low power use the heat dissipation may not be a major issue. But if there is an unremovable battery i’d still be concerned about heat dissipation with the lid closed and even just the battery itself regardless of heat dissipiation.