Devil's advocate...how much do we really care about these different distros at this point. The world lives out of the browser. As long as I have chrome and VS Code I'm pretty good to go.

When your browser is shipped via a snap and is 2 versions out of date because the update mechanism sucks and has been failing silently for over a month, it makes a difference.

There's my personal anecdote.

Firefox through snap has been the last straw for me as well. Not quite enough to ragequit on the spot, but next time I have to install a new OS, it won't be Ubuntu.

why do you install it from snap? I'm using ubuntu and don't install from snap most of the time.

It's the default now.

Yup, and installing Firefox via apt installs a snap as well. I manually had to add a separate apt repo for Firefox alone. I seem to have to do this more and more for things that just can't be slow on my machine.

Yep, I did the same. But I don't want to mess around with hacks like that any more, so my next distro isn't going to be Ubuntu, even though I've used some Ubuntu variant for over a decade now. I'm looking at Tumbleweed for my next distro.

I like the security/privacy promises of options like snaps. It seems like other issues, like file sizes, aren’t the worst. And getting it to match your os options seems like a solvable problem. Could somebody explain why they hate these systems?

They live in the past of outdated security models.

I dislike snaps because they introduce inefficiencies and I don't want want applications to each bundle their own copies of the shared libraries they depend on. I also don't want automatic sandboxing.

I still use applications and my file system.

> The world lives out of the browser

Exactly: my productive environment is «out of the browser» and I want it to be as fitting as possible, for my efficiency and comfort.

Agree. OSes are practically irrelevant. The only thing I need is a web browser and a terminal with posix like commands. I can (almost) get that on Windows these days.

I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.

You also need some form of window management, and if you like tiling windows, Linux has the most options by far.

If you miss focus follows mouse and like tiling windows, i3 and sway both have that option.

Others might too, those are the only two I have experience with though.

That's one of the jobs of Finder. And no, I don't like tiling windows.

One of the downfalls of Linux Desktop, besides the fragmentation, was Apple and Microsoft figuring out that a large majority wants a POSIX like experience, and aren't that deep onto GNU/Linux anyway.

There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.

I didn't care much about one distro vs another until I found a lot of packages I wanted were packaged for Arch Linux and not Ubuntu Linux, and the Arch Wiki was better than Ubuntu's docs. And also, yes "Snaps" were annoying.

Imo package managers/repos, update cycles, and installation process can still be a reasonable differentiator between distros. Admittedly these decisions are fairly minor -- most popular packages are available on the major repos and you probably aren't installing your distro every day. But even though most the time I'm just living in nvim and Firefox, if adding or changing something becomes a chore it can really expand quickly as I might avoid making a positive change to my system just because I can't overcome the initial inertia from having to bend my distro to my will. Then again, that's probably a sign that I should swallow my pride and switch from Arch to Manjaro at some point.

Good for you I guess, but most features I need aren't offered by web apps. Paradoxically, Linux is the only platform where desktop apps are the default.

Linux still has its fair share of electron wrapper "applications"

There are some, but nothing of real importance (to me, YMMV). There are no electron-based applications that I use.

> The world lives out of the browser

Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.

Different strokes and all that.

Some people run servers.

Servers don't have GUIs, even Windows now has a headless version.

Fedora Workstation and especially Silverblue made Linux work for me in a way no distribution I have used before has been able to. Being bleeding edge yet stable and reliable just made it so pleasant, coming from a mix of Slitaz, Elementary and Manjaro.

Also switched to Silverblue and love it.

Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time.

I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.

Do you do development on it? If so, how do you work around Silverblue's restrictions? Curious about people's experiences.

I do. I use toolboxes for pretty much all my development. I've scripted the setup each type of toolbox I use, so they can be reproduced. I use a terminal editor (neovim), but I think it's possible to run vscode from a toolbox too[1].

For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.

The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...

It's a great design for development since your dev environments are isolated and you can have multiple, without risking breaking your main OS.

I use a combination of toolbox, distrobox, flatpak, docker, homebrew, junest and custom bwrap scripts.

Yeah, I agree (although with Kinoite because fuck GNOME). It still has plenty of issues, but at least I don't feel like I'm constantly fighting the system just to use software.

Fedora isn't perfect, but it can go for weeks without updates and then update cleanly reliably, which is not something you typically get with rolling distributions. This makes it well suited for use as a dual booted secondary OS or VM OS.

Anecdata: I've used Arch Linux for several years and it's been probably 3-4 years since I've had any stability issues with it after upgrading. And the last time I did run into problems, it was from bugs in the open source AMD GPU drivers due to how relatively immature they were at the time.

Would I use it for a mission critical workstation or server? Probably not. But for daily personal use, it's been completely fine for me and I would highly recommend it to others.

Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.

> Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.

I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience with how that "half" lives, but: this is one of the things that's so nice about MacOS + Homebrew. It's a very stable core (up through and including the graphical environment—after all, if that breaks on a workstation/desktop, that's nearly as bad as the whole OS breaking) that only updates every couple years (and I can ignore the updates a long time without notable consequences) with a very-high-package-count package manager that's rolling-release on top of it, for most of the software I directly use.

I'd love to see a Linux distro that worked that way—I don't think I could go back to doing package management the typical Linux way, on my workstation. I've done rolling-release, I've done everything-stable-and-maybe-some-bodged-in-extra-repositories-for-newer-stuff, and both suck, for my needs, compared to this arrangement. Stable core + rolling applications is great, would be thrilled to see more Linux distros explore that kind of thing.

Homebrew has its issues, but yes I also like the approach of the system and the packages I install living in two entirely separate worlds, with the system being boring and stable and other packages lining up with whatever is currently shipping for Windows/macOS. The extra space consumed is negligible and well worth the turbulence reduction.

Immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue seem to lean in that direction, though I've never used them personally.

I have heard good things about NixOS but I am also told its not a normie daily driver.

You better love Unix to run NixOS. I do love Unix, I was a FreeBSD fellow, but Nix is so incredible that everything else feels like poking at your hard drive with a stick.

Editing a file in /etc/ feels like PEEK/POKEing to memory now. Barbaric.

If you desire stability and you’re already used to Ubuntu derivatives, there’s always Debian.

The issue with Debian is how old application packages are, and I'm not really into Flatpak. Fedora's packages are pretty close in recency to what's shipping on other platforms.

Stability and update frequency are inversely correlated. It’s largely an unavoidable trade-off.

It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you.

Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons).

I’m just stating the obvious here, really.

Debian testing is more stable than other "so-called stable" distros, and has often newer packages than the contemporary ubuntu version.

Debian testing puts you in a pretty bad place in terms of security updates; you're not getting new upstream releases as quickly as unstable/experimental, but they don't do dedicated backports of security fixes like with stable.

I'm super happy with Fedora for ~ 4 years. It's always one/two versions behind (currently 37) and it never gave me any problems (compared to manjaro/arch/ubuntu and few other smaller distro that I've used, but names escapes me) Fedora seems faster than Ubuntu out of the box on the same hardware. It's also rock solid from my experience. That may be somehow related to docker doing heavy lifting when needed. Ofc YMMV.

I found the installer was lacking something I typically wanted. Disk encryption maybe? Or maybe it’s partitioning or file system options were limited? Can’t recall. It kept me from trying it out full time at one point

The installer having disk encryption is one of the reasons I chose Fedora. I use Kinoite with btrfs over LUKS, FWIW.