I don’t know why this never occurred to me. This is what I’m going to do from now on.

Not Brazzite, “Bazzite.” It’s a mineral, and its naming proximity to an adult website is entirely coincidental (and I would hazard a guess that the mineral was named first).

Honestly, I’m not that concerned with Bazzite being newer, because it’s based on Fedora CoreOS. It utilizes rpm-ostree to manage system upgrades, so for any bad updates, you just rollback to any previous deployments (and you can pin specific ones so you are guaranteed a stable rollback point). Additionally, you can rebase at any time, so you can swap out the system layer for another ostree-based image without touching any of your files in /etc, /var, and /home.

Pop!_OS is a great choice, too, but the biggest problem facing the family of Universal Blue distros isn’t notoriety, it’s the fact that Fedora Atomics in general are still relatively new. The examples are still being written, and people are getting used to new tooling.

But if you don’t need specific customizations like me, and all your software can be found as appimages or flatpaks (or is already installed), Aurora, Bluefin, and Bazzite are all rock-solid choices that will “just work.”

That’s a good idea.

There was a post about that exact issue not that long ago, basically, you have to do some networking trickery to get some printers to work.

I agree that there’s a big learning curve, though it’s a nice option if everything you need can be found as a flatpak or appimage.

They could get RasPis below 4th gen running outdated software, I guess. I think I read elsewhere that Debian already had a patch out some time ago, so that number is also likely diminishingly small.

Stuff you do and don’t document or don’t force yourself to recognize comes back to bite you years later when you can’t use the normal tooling in order to deal with it.

And it’s this right here that forces me to really consider if Bazzite is right for me in this case (and why I didn’t just immediately go with the easier rpm-ostree option). Podman is kind of a necessary tool, at least currently, and if your use case falls outside flatpaks, rpm-ostree, and appimages, it’s Podman or bust (and I currently have an app like that, which I haven’t yet figured out).

I appreciate your experienced advice. I have probably a total five years of experience, so I would be foolish not to consider to the long-timers offering similar advice in these comments.

Atomic distros are very much a work in progress and they do have issues you won’t find in non-atomic distros.

And this is kind of how I’m starting to look at it, after reading all of these comments. There definitely feels like there’s a disconnect between services like Podman and atomic ideology born out of the fact that they were created with different goals in mind. If the two can be married a bit better, the learning curve can be flattened (and I think that’s a distinct future possibility, since Podman and Fedora Atomics have Red Hat backing).

Regarding breaks, being able to rollback is very handy, and I’ve used it many times when I was running Bazzite on my Steam Deck. Regressions happen, and I’ve experienced problematic regressions on non-atomic distros where my only option was to reinstall. This will be my daily driver that needs near full uptime, so whatever I pick, it’s gotta be solid without entirely sacrificing relative newness (i.e. not Debian).

Either way, there’s more to consider than I initially thought, and I appreciate your input.

No, which is why I added the qualifier “basically,” which implies a fundamental sameness while still having technical differences.

Very good advice, though I’ve personally been dabbling for many years and generally know a handful of things. Still, I would recommend the same thing for anyone new to Linux. There’s some fantastic options, these days!

I might just be a glutton for punishment, however. 😆

Oh, okay. That is quite a bit different. I guess those QoL tweaks can still be worth it, then!

I may try that. They have OpenVPN for connecting to a different domain on the network, so maybe it’s possible a config could exist for the one I need to connect to.

If Btrfs snapshots + Snapper would have been sufficient, then openSUSE themselves would never have desired the creation of openSUSE MicroOS (i.e. their attempt at an ‘immutable’ distro) in the first place.

An excellent point.

But to your earlier one, I can get the VPN client working outside of a container. There’s even an RPM file from the vendor, so installing it is just as easy as installing any other package.

I appreciate the input!

But then aren’t you basically back to Firefox?

That’s good to know, especially the gaming part. I have tried it in the past, only briefly, and I remember enjoying the experience (older laptop, so gaming was out of the question). I’ll have to throw an ISO on my thumb drive to give it another try!

Straight to the point!

Considering the US, where they’re filing the lawsuit, has just recently opened up the floodgates of corporate lobbying power thanks to SCOTUS, I don’t know why anyone would want to support such a maliciously litigious company.

The subpoenas will continue until morale improves.

Ah, now I can be excited for them and move on with my day. I get that video presentations can be great for feature releases that need visual aids, but I don’t want to sit through a video for details that can be summed up in two sentences.

I like LibreWolf, but I don’t like that it wipes cookies and session tokens each time you launch it. I understand why they do it, but it’s a consideration outside my threat model, so it just annoys me.

I currently run Bazzite full time on an HTPC laptop, but I don’t use that for work purposes at all. It’s been great, and I would be a little sad if I couldn’t fit Bazzite into my use case.

But I’m fully aware that my frustrations are atomic problems, and I’ve had no issues installing the software I need on non-atomic distros. The reason I’m so smitten by atomic distros is the fact that there’s theoretically no down time. I’ve had distros break in the past due to some squirrely install or update, and I’ve never once had that issue on Bazzite.

I just recently learned that openSUSE users also have a lot of stability due to btrfs snapshots, so maybe that’s really the feature I’m looking for. I don’t know much about it, honestly.

Aurora is really nice, and I should see if I can get it working better in a VM to try it out. The main differences between Aurora and Bazzite that I can tell are the suites of preinstalled packages and the particular ujust recipes included.

Tailscale is probably not something I can use, unfortunately, since my employer has set up connectivity via SonicWall. I doubt they’re going to allow a change just for me. 😅