Atomic desktops enforce immutability, the core system is literally a ROM almost like stock Android.

Thank you for quenching my curiosity! The analogy to Android makes me worry that you might be associating stuff with atomic distros that are not (inherently) tied to them. Which, to be fair, happens a LOT, unfortunately…

secureblue imposes slightly less restrictions.

In short, as secureblue is ultimately derived from Fedora Atomic, it follows (most of) its conventions. Though, it’s most similar to uBlue in particular due to relying on their images initially. As such, all methods of installing software on say Bazzite apply to secureblue as well. Note, however, that secureblue prefers to keep it leaner for the sake of both security and simplicity. Finally, like Fedora Atomic and uBlue, it also allows you to customize the guts of your OS by creating/configuring an image.

However, AFAIK it is not lightweight enough for my setup. Pretty same as Gentoo, I guess.

If you can run KDE Plasma, then you should be able to run both NixOS and Gentoo.

my learning curve will be fairly steep

😅. Honestly, I think it’s exaggerated. But I’m only ankles deep in NixOS…

it lacks some cons of Atomic desktops

What would those cons be 😜? Btw, I’m fully aware of the arguments laid down by those averse to the idea of atomic distros. I’m mostly interested in the influence they have on a newer user. So, please, just reveal what you had in mind without searching up the cons 😉.

But some people in this thread are downvoting me for this. It feels like if I were hated for trying to delete Edge from Windows.

The KDE Plasma circlejerk is real 🤣.

I’m more focused on resource usage reasonability, efficiency and control.

And my aspiration to decide and control what happens in my PC

One day I’ll just come up with using DIY distros like Arch and Gentoo and building custom kernels, so I’ll be responsible for any kind of bloat there.

Or perhaps NixOS. It allows for congruent system management rather trivially. Add to that the impermanence module, and the amount of control you’ll have on your machine is simply unmatched.

It comes at a cost, though. NixOS is the most complex distro out of the reasonably popular ones^[1]. But, honestly, it isn’t that bad. If you’ve got experience with programming, you can dive right in (within a VM). And otherwise, after you’ve become comfortable with Arch or Gentoo, then NixOS becomes a logical step-up.

But the day hasn’t come yet, I’m still new to Linux.

Welcome 😊! I await to see what you’ll bring to the table 😜.

OP, even if I personally don’t entirely agree with your sentiment. I am fully aware it is a legit one and I’m actually even sympathetic to the idea.

As others have already provided solutions to your problem, I just wanted to share https://suckless.org/philosophy/ with you. I’m pretty sure this is either were you are right now, or the logical conclusion of your trajectory.

Have you ever met something else in Linux or it’s ecosystem, that appeared to be bloatware to you (and how did you disable it)?

Perhaps through sheer luck^[1] the Linux systems I’ve used have always been pretty minimal.

As bloat often comes with additional attack surface, the security-sensitive will be implored to go with minimalism anyways. As such, my current distro of choice; namely secureblue, is actively engaged with debloating the system. Recently, it has even started working on ‘debloating’ the kernel. Like, why should my system autoload parts of the kernel used to drive all sorts of old and niche hardware; like remote controls etc?

Still, there are stuff that I’m not using, but I’m too lazy to hunt them down 😅.

My headcanon is that they wanted to offer a modern middle ground between GNOME and KDE Plasma. Perhaps we might refer to it as “COSMIC before COSMIC” but without:

• being built on Rust,
• Wayland-first design,
• easy and well-thought-out tiling on demand.

OP, could you please clarify what it is you’re asking. Thanks!

I did read everything and I appreciate your writing!

Thank you so much! I appreciate it 😊!

I might give Fedora another try at some point

It’s a big honour that you’re even reconsidering your stance on Fedora. Thank you! But, honestly 😜, I wasn’t interested in proselytizing Fedora or anything. I wanted to better understand your stance and perhaps^[1] learn something in the process.

I’m a happy man.

I’m glad to hear you are 😊. Have (another) good one, fam!

This became a lot longer of a writing than I expected. My apologies*. So, without further ado.

I got confused with CentOS changes in 2000: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

It eroded my trust with anything Red Hat-related. And the acquisition by IBM in 2019 had already damaged its image.

Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying! I remember that the pushback was real on that one. But, I’m not sure if it was justified. If anything, I’d say that people had a knee-jerk reaction to it and it soon after became a ‘toxic’ environment in which reasonable discourse was (almost) non-existent.

However, Gordon Messmer^[1]’s piece on this suggests that CentOS was everything but what was idealized by the community. As such, being converted to CentOS Stream might have been a positive change.

Anyhow, honestly, I’m not well-versed with RHEL(-clones). So feel free to dismiss anything I’ve said 😜.

Moving on… What’s perhaps important to note is that Fedora’s relation to Red Hat is a curious one. For example, Fedora defaults to Btrfs for its file system while Red Hat has deprecated it for quite a while now. Furthermore, while Red Hat seems to go pretty hard on Image Mode, Fedora didn’t even block a major update (until very recently) if some bug impacted its atomic variants very negatively. So, basically, Red Hat’s priorities =/= Fedora’s priorities.

But, having said all of that, I do respect your choice to not trust anything Red Hat-related. Perhaps, I would have done so as well, were it not for the fact that I’ve been daily driving Fedora(-derivatives) for quite a while. Yes, I admit that I’m probably biased 😅.

Last time I tried Fedora (around last year), anything installed via the “software” app in GNOME defaulted to a flatpak install.

Interesting. I literally did a fresh Fedora install within a VM and the results have been interesting:

• If it catches (!) that the package is available within any non-flatpak repository, then it will prefer the .rpm install by default. Examples include Steam and GNOME builder.
• However, if for some strange reason the .rpm package is not picked up, then it does default to flatpak. And it’s not possible to select the .rpm package within the GUI either. Even though sudo dnf install <package name> does work as you’d expect 😅. Examples include Neovim.

I wonder if you had to deal with the above shenanigans last year as well. Or, perhaps, it was even worse for some awful reason. Anyhow, there’s more truth to it than I expected. Though, I’d argue it’s probably some bug or otherwise unintended behavior.

If you’ve read all of my ramblings, then I’d like to thank you for the effort 😊! Have a good one, fam!

Definitely. Though, for completeness’ sake, both rpm-ostree and (even) ostree offered something similar:

• rpm-ostree usroverlay for the former
• ostree admin unlock for the latter

Though, I don’t know if RakuOS’ hacking could leverage either one of the above for the persistent overlay…

Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer:

I may have misunderstood the announcement 5 years ago

I didn’t reference any 5 year old announcement. If you didn’t imply that anyways, then please consider sharing the 5 year old announcement.

Are they still defaulting to flatpak for new apps?

Did Fedora ever default to flatpak for new apps 🤔? For Fedora Atomic, sure. But I don’t recall traditional Fedora ever doing so. This isn’t Canonical that re-installs an .deb installation as a snap.

I suppose it’s pretty easy to see why when you consider what the most^[1] popular plugins are for the popular shell zsh:

• zsh-autosuggestions
• zsh-syntax-highlighting

Both of which literally start by referencing fish in their respective READMEs.

And where zsh requires plugins to get these, fish has these by default. Perhaps unsurprising as fish stands for Friendly Interactive SHell. As such, the niceties don’t stop there.

Basically, if you want a no-nonsense shell that gets pretty much out of your way and comes with excellent defaults right of the gate, then you simply can’t go wrong with fish.

Take this from someone that stubbornly tried to bend bash to my will with stuff like ble.sh (link) and later zsh with zsh-quickstart-kit, but to no avail… It always caused more trouble than it was worth. And when I finally gave in and tried fish, it was pure bliss from the get-go. The rest has been history… Fish has literally become the first thing I install on all my systems.

Note, however, that (as per fish’ documentation) you shouldn’t change your login shell to fish. This blogpost by a CoreOS engineer goes over it in more length.

Excellent insight, thank you (once again)!

While not much, this is the kind of endorsement I wanted out of this. Even though I was being deliberately horrid at communicating that 😜.

Hehe, that’s very close to my reaction when I first heard about it 😜. I wasn’t able to find any of the technical details either, so I approached them through one of their community channels and they’ve been very patient and helpful. So, IIUC, they leverage bootc usr-overlay. But where bootc usr-overlay is transient, thus making anything installed through dnf go away on every reboot. RakuOS has somehow hacked their way to make it persistent instead. For more details, I’d suggest making contact with them. Perhaps you can retrofit their solution to your own system 😉.

Ah, okay. I do concede that -historically- Fedora wasn’t robust, no. They weren’t shy about breaking changes, which even led them to be referred to as Red Hat’s test bed distro by the community and beyond.

However, for (at least) the last 5 years or so, Fedora’s direction has changed significantly. I’m not entirely sure what prompted this change, but it has definitely been a welcome one. For example: most recently, Fedora has somewhat even formalized this new approach with their new initiative.

Basically, Fedora wants to be innovative like they’ve always been known for. But, this shouldn’t come at the cost of alienating your own user base. Thus, the proposal details how these two perspectives can see eye to eye with each other.

As for KDE Plasma; again -historically- it has been a second-class citizen on Fedora; at least, compared to GNOME. But, KDE Plasma has since been promoted. There’s no meaningful difference between the two variants when it comes to how Fedora regards them. Even the website alludes to this:

Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.

Why do you think that?

Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro)

If you mean that they’re more stable, then I simply have to assume that you think those are more robust than Fedora (because the other interpretation^[1] wouldn’t make any sense). Which (again) begs the question… why do you think that?

like how fedora atomic desktop is to ublue

Great analogy! Even though I’m pretty caught up with the whole bootc shebang, I didn’t make that connection between Guix and rde. Thank you!

Alright, that was quite illuminating. I suppose I was definitely not grasping the full extent of the extensibility found on Guix. And, perhaps more importantly, how it’s a defining feature of Guix. Thank you; I appreciate it.

Perhaps I’m being too romantic, but just like how rde users were the first to catch a glimpse of guix home, so too it feels that today’s rde users are catching a glimpse of features that will eventually land on Guix proper.

Alright, that has been a bit more elucidating. Thank you!

I’m literally a newb to Guix, so please forgive me for my ignorance.

But while using (parts of) rde by regarding it as a channel is found within its documentation, I don’t think it’s the full picture. Like, rde is also a distro, at least by the admission of its creator. The same can not be said about nonguix. So, to be frank, I don’t think it’s just another Guix channel.

Having said that, I am still very new to all of this. So, if I’m incorrect and/or my understanding is lacking, then please feel free to correct/educate me on this.

While I think hearing about the sequence is cool as well, I was actually more interested in the (in)direct motivation behind it. Like, how did Arch Linux (specifically) manage to pique your interest?