themadcodger

Like OP said, you can get Plasma on Bazzite, as well as install it right on a SteamDeck if you have one. It’s constantly being updated, and if gaming is your main driver, Bazzite goes out of its way to make things work. In theory you wouldn’t have to do any tinkering to get games running, with the added bonus that you won’t be messing up or introducing any entropy to your system files. If something does go wrong, you can reboot into the previous release and it’ll be back to where you just came from.

There’s still plenty to learn if you want to, it’s just not the traditional Linux distro setup.

Can’t help with saved game data, but Bazzite is a solid choice, not just because it’s a gaming based distro. It’s one of the immutable distros, so all the important stuff that keeps it running, you can’t mess with (easily). And all your personal stuff that doesn’t keep the computer running, it doesn’t touch. So your computer is always up to date ( faster than steamOS, and if something goes wrong, just reboot into the previous) and you can’t screw it up without trying.

You’re not. If you’re happy with what you’ve got, don’t worry about it. Or join the great Linux tradition of distro hopping. But Mint gets a lot of praise for noobs, but much like Ubuntu there are much better distros out there. It just has name recognition at this point.

Bazzite is just kinoite / silverblue repackaged as Universal Blue, and then modified to preinstall some qol apps and settings. So if you like the original, but don’t want to start with a blank slate, want the nice things out of the box, start with Bazzite/bluefin/aurora (gaming/gnome/KDE).

For people who know what they’re doing/want, starting blank slate makes sense. For newbies or people who don’t feel like dealing with that 🙋🏼‍♂️ the latter is a better recommendation imho

Okay good, you also included Aurora. I agree almost completely with your previous post that mint is outdated, and an immutable is much better for someone who has no idea what they’re doing. No reason to blanket recommend Bazzite, hence the aurora comment.

I’m on Bluefin though, so that’s where we disagree 😏 Don’t know what it is but I’ve never liked KDE.

Yeah, honestly I don’t get all the love for mint whenever this question comes up. Bazzite’s a good choice, I’m running Bluefin it’s sister (same thing but not geared toward gamers) and it’s been great from a set it and forget it perspective. One caution is that they don’t always play nice with dual booting, so make sure you do your due diligence backing up what’s important to you.

Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.

Bluefin-dx is the more dev oriented version, and I think Bazzite has a -dx version as well. But I agree, I’m using Bluefin and love it for the containerization.

Yeah, I thought the main devs were Latvian 🤔

Someone else mentioned it, but another vote for Aurora-dx (-dx for the developer version). It’ll give you the KDE experience without having to worry about your underlying system, leaving you time to work on software dev in a containerized environment of your choosing. Arch is great if you want to customize and tinker with everything, but given your parameters, I think not worrying about that bit will make your life easier as you focus on what’s more important to you. As long as you reboot your computer from time to time, you’ll always have the latest version and can rollback easily if something goes wrong.

And as is tradition with Linux, it’s not like you have to use whatever you decide forever. Distro hopping is a time-honored tradition!

It’s not the exact same (a 1:1 replacement) but have you looked at Logseq as an alternative to Obsidian. It is open source and serves a lot of the same needs as a wiki-style editor, but may not be exactly what you need in Obsidian

There are dozens of us! But yeah, same.

I just discovered bat and eza, which were already installed, along with fd though I haven’t played with that one yet. I’ve really liked the first two at least

If it makes you feel any better it sort of is Fedora. Fedora has both original and atomic flavors. Someone took the atomic flavor of Fedora (which comes as a blank slate) and added in some quality of life changes. Nothing permanent, just tweaking some settings and preinstalling some programs. And then called it as Aurora.

And the only difference between Aurora and Bluefin is KDE (very customizable and Windows like) vs Gnome (customizable through widgets, but not enough if you’re a power tweaker and more of a Mac style desktop environments). And Bazzite is the same, but gamer focused (I installed it on my steamdeck).

Yeah, seconded on Tailscale. I love how easy it is to get working. Only fear is the recent announcement of venture funding and future enshitification, but right now it’s amazing.

Yeah, I didn’t want to be not supportive of your choice of distros, but my immediate thought was not Ubuntu… I use it headless for some homelab servers, but nowadays as far as desktops go, Ubuntu is not it.

Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework, and it has been pretty set it and forget it. They’re all “atomic” desktops in that it’s hard to be able change the underlaying important parts of your computer, while you have free reign on all the bits that aren’t important to keep the lights on. Updates happen frequently, but don’t touch your files on top, so it’s always the latest, and if something does break, you can easily boot up into the last image you were on.

If you’re not looking to tweak your computer too much and just want it to run, I’d recommend Aurora or Bluefin depending on your desktop preferences.

The self-contained webxdc apps are a pretty cool bonus to what already feels like a normal chat app. I primarily use Signal, but given the current climate of governments trying to force backdoors in to encrypted apps, and the fact it’s a US server, I wanted a decentralized backup. And email isn’t going anywhere, so it seems like a good option.

Kinda, but that’s the gist of it.

Yeah, that’s when I first used it too, it had to go through your email. Now it just uses the email backbone to send messages back and forth. Also, self-contained webxdc apps you can use with people in your chat, which is kinda cool.

😭