I use Bazzite on a laptop that’s shared by family, and it’s great. I never have to worry about downtime, and I know they’ll always have a computer should something happen to me.

I once had a bad update, and I just used rpm-ostree rollback, and I was up and running again. Really great for anyone that wants to set it and forget it.

Linux Mint or Nobara would be great beginner distros and would each be great for gaming. If gaming is more important, I would lean towards Nobara. If general use is more important, Mint.

Keep in mind that you can try most of these out in a Virtual Machine. Some others to consider are PikaOS and CachyOS. I’m also working on my migration, and I install and set up everything with each ISO as if I was doing it for real, to see what hiccups I might run into. It will be slower, but it’s just a trial run, so just expect things to be faster when you do it for real!

Drop Norton, full stop.

Take a look at https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/ to get a better overview of what you need to look for in a VPN.

This is the way. I sincerely wish you luck! That’s how good stuff gets started.

Alright, go out and make it, then. Nobody is stopping you.

I don’t know the reasoning, but since the uBlue main image is meant to be a sort of base template (iirc), my guess is there was a decision to downstream all of those additions, to allow child distributions to improve the build process and make their own opinionated changes.

You might try asking on the uBlue discord.

Generally true when we’re talking about capitalism.

That’s not necessarily true for FOSS projects, however, since money making isn’t necessarily their goal. Linus Torvalds doesn’t force you to watch an ad or sell off contributors’ data to get the privilege of using the Linux kernel, for example. Bazzite doesn’t sell IP addresses of people who download their distro to data aggregators.

However, you should do your homework and check who is in charge of projects like these and note what changes they’re bringing.

You can write to any folder in /var and /etc (/home is actually a symlink to /var/home).

Bazzite is atomic, and you can’t just install whatever you want wherever you want like a traditional distro. It sounds like you’re making directories in your home folder, so you should be fine to set everything up there, as long as Lutris knows that’s where the wine prefix is and your game knows where to find the mods.

Sounds like you should run for office.

It’s going to have to start at the local level. They’re usually the ones that have less budget and less influence to sell, anyway.

They could, and if I was an EU government entity, I would do my homework on what they were offering, even if they were acting 100% in good faith.

However, helping governments get away from the clutches of the likes of Apple and Microsoft seems like a noble goal, and if this idea spurs that change regardless of the adoption of this distro, I think it will have been a net positive.

From the subheading on the ReadMe.

Community-led Proof-of-Concept for a free Operating System for the EU public sector 🇪🇺

So it’s made by the EU in the sense that the maintainers are likely citizens of the EU, I guess.

I don’t know what any of that means, either. I think real world increases in performance are something like 10% for general computing, but it’s negligible for gaming.

The only thing that’s distinctly different from EndeavorOS is they have their own repos for optimized packages and their own helper interface for changing kernels, adding common packages, getting drivers, etc.

Not a Sonos.

While I like the sound of my Sonos One, their app fucking sucks, and you have to use it to do anything (and I am supremely patient with technology). I am so close to just trashing it and the only thing stopping me is that I don’t yet have a replacement for it.

I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don’t want some hard work tweak I’ve implemented being nuked by an update.

Bazzite can do that. Unlike SteamOS, you cannot edit the system files, so there’s no customizations to wipe out. That said, user customizations generally live in /var and /etc, and those are left intact during updates. They’re also the only directories that are mutable on purpose (/var/home/youruser is found there). You can also layer RPM files or dnf packages using rpm-ostree install. It’s a longer install process than traditional package managers, but it ensures you always have a restore point.

As a sidenote, I do recommend also checking out distrobox, as it’s a useful tool anywhere but especially on atomic systems.

CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me.

Don’t be. Arch isn’t a big deal. The only reason people tend to like it is because vanilla Arch is a blank slate. That means the user gets to decide what goes into their system, but distros like CachyOS take all of that choice and decide what to include for you, in advance. So you get the same update schedule as the rest of Arch users, but you don’t have to think so hard about whether you want to use zfs or btrfs (for example).

If you want a great installation experience and mature community, I should also mention EndeavorOS. It’s Arch, but boy do they have the installation and onboarding down really well. If you’re nervous about CachyOS or Arch at all, check out this one.

CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don’t need beta instability right now.

Fair, and it’s not even in beta, it’s Alpha. I just mention it, because it’s going to be a big deal when it’s finished. Keep an eye on it.

Spin up some VMs and give em all a try!

Mint is a great first choice, and you should be able to do lots with it, but there’s others you might want to at least be aware of, if gaming is important.

If you don’t care about customization at all, Bazzite (Fedora). While you can update typical things like panels, icon styles, window decorations, etc., making changes to things like SDDM requires a little bit more creativity.

That’s because it’s atomic (mostly immutable). You don’t have to worry about a bad update breaking your system, since you can just rpm-ostree rollbackand get back to it. The downside is that atomic distros have a different way they’re designed, so learning how to work with them has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s worth learning, imo.

CachyOS (Arch). Kinda the hot thing right now. It’s Arch but oriented towards gaming, content creation, and optimized computing. You’ll have full customization abilities like a traditional distro, access to the AUR, and some really nice kernel and scheduler tweaking tools.

Pop!_OS Cosmic (Ubuntu). Pop!_OS has been a longtime popular choice, but they’re currently throwing all their effort into their brand new Cosmic desktop environment, so I’d wait until everything is at least in Beta. It looks great, though, and I think it’s going to set some new standards for user experiences.

So glad to see docks coming back

Do you have any statements from the dev? Would be curious to know if there’s anything that corroborates it being abandoned or on hiatus.

But it sure does seem that way. I remember Boost for Reddit getting updates all the time, and this one had a few in the beginning, then it just kinda stopped with bugs unresolved.

It’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like about Boost.

Still not on Boost, unfortunately.

Oh, how I wish spoilers worked in my Lemmy app…