Out of curiosity, what are the benefits of using say bluefin over just plain fedora?

Let’s say we compare regular Fedora (Workstation) or KDE spin with Vanilla Silverblue or Kinoite (Atomic).

Fedora Atomic is the newest generation of Linux, as some people call it.

It is a bit similar to how Android works. Basically, the core operating system is “locked up”, and everything you do is done as normal user, including app installations.
Therefore, you have a “you” section, with all Flatpak apps and cat videos, and a “OS” part, which you don’t have to care about.

Of course this is still Linux, and you have full sudo permissions and can still install all software on the host system, e.g. Nvidia drivers. Upstream Fedora Atomic is good, but has some minor flaws, like users having to install said Nvidia drivers or codecs manually.

uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin, etc.) basically take the upstream image and rebuild it with a lot of tweaks and optimizations, like having codecs (e.g. for watching videos) already included. They especially try to make everything as user friendly as possible and provide a “just works” distro.

As I said, it’s a bit similar to how you use Android: you don’t use Android, it’s only a platform for you to launch your apps. You don’t worry about codecs, updates gone wrong, or whatever. You just use it and don’t think about it. And that’s the mission. Building an extremely robust and simple OS.

I should also add that I prefer a long term support installation because I don’t reinstall very often.

You’ll never have to reinstall anything. If an update comes out, either a big release or just bug fixes, they get installed in the background and then applied onto the next boot without any interference. You don’t notice it.

And if you really want to switch to another variant, e.g. when the new Cosmic DE comes out, you can do it with just one command. With that, the “you” section is kept, and the “OS part” is swapped out.

And if you worry about being too bleeding edge, you can choose the ´gts´ variant of Bluefin, which is a more conservative branch with less surprises.

I can wholeheartly recommend you either Bazzite or Aurora / Bluefin.

All three are pretty much the exact same under the hood (Fedora Atomic). They are from the uBlue-Project and focus A LOT on user friendliness, hardware enablement and a “boring” (just works) experience.

Bazzite is more meant for gaming, and Aurora and Bluefin are more for general use, but you can of course use them totally interchangeably. You can even try out one, and if you don’t like it as much, you can rebase to another variant with just one command.

The cool thing about them is that the Nvidia drivers are already baked into the image if you choose the Nvidia option on the download page.

This means, that you probably won’t encounter any breakages, and even if you do, you don’t have to fix them on your own. If your setup breaks, every one else’s will break too, because the non-user-facing part of the OS is the same everywhere, and the devs will fix it very rapidly. In the meantime, you can just select the image from yesterday, where everything still worked, and continue with your stuff for the next few hours :)

I’ve never encountered such a chill distro in my Linux journey yet!

Maybe Fedora Atomic?

I mean, image based (immutable) distros are quite a bit more secure than regular ones, and Fedora Atomic (Silverblue, Bazzite, etc.) is pretty much the only great choice when it comes to those kind of operating systems.

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I use and love both. KDE (Bazzite) on my desktop gaming PC, and Gnome (Bluefin) on my laptop for casual stuff, mostly YouTube.

KDE is a bit better for gaming since it has HDR and VRR and is the standard DE on the Steam Deck. I tried Gnome too just a few days ago, but it felt inferior in regards of gaming and content creation.

Gnome on the other hand has a place reserved on my laptop aswell as in my heart. Especially the ultra smooth and well thought out touch gestures and minimalist UI makes it perfect for laptop usage.

For me personally, I prefer Gnome over KDE. KDE is a bit more capable, but it overwhelms me sometimes. Gnome has a better concept and workflow for me. You either love or hate it, I do the first.

My desktop is a full AMD system that I set up specifically for Linux compatibility, and the laptop is also one of the best compatible ones out there (Dell XPS) with firmware updates included.

Theoretically, the system should be less buggy than other ones, because due to Fedora Atomic, there is less configuration drift and easier fixing for devs due to reproducibility.

I believe that’s due to package drift.

Every system starts with the same packages, but due to upgrading or adding/ removing stuff, you slowly drift away from the starting point, which makes it truly “your own”. But this also introduces bugs that aren’t reproducible.

I especially noticed it with KDE. Every time I installed a new distro or configuration, it worked fine, but after a few months, the bugs and crashes got more and more.

Since I installed Fedora Atomic (the “immutable” variant, e.g. Silverblue), everything just works. It’s extremely comfortable and just exists, so I can run my apps. When you upgrade the system, you don’t just download one package and install it, you apply it to the whole OS and then basically have the same install as all the thousands of other users out there, which makes it reproducible.

Maybe that’s something for you? You can check out Aurora, Bazzite or uBlue in general.

The problem with package based distros (everything non-immutable) is, that a distro is very complex.

Even if you manage to “swap out” the package repositories, you usually still have a lot of remaining stuff in the background and many things tweaked by the maintainers. It’s a huge mess.

In theory, you could absolutely do that, but to be honest, why bother? You already always should have a backup of all your personal data, so why not reinstall it cleanly?

Speaking of image based distros (“immutable”), the cool thing about most is that that you can easily swap out the underlying OS with just one command.

For example, you can always rebase from Fedora Silverblue to Kinoite to Bazzite to something with Hyprland and then back to vanilla Silverblue, without any traces.

So, for example, if the guy who makes your custom image on Github stops maintaining it, you can simply switch to something else in just seconds.

Maybe this is something relevant for you :)

Yeah, +1 from my side for Fedora Atomic, especially uBlue.

For this use case, I can absolutely recommend using Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin (Gnome), especially with the gts branch.

uBlue offers different branches, namely:

• latest: in sync with the current Fedora repos, all the newest stuff official Fedora also ships, including kernel
• stable this is the default by now. You have to wait two weeks more for feature and kernel updates, but they are better tested. If something would have broken, others would have noticed and already fixed it.
• gts: this one is what I recommend for this use case. With that, you’ll get the last release.

At the moment, F41 hit Bazzite/ Aurora latest already three weeks ago when it landed, on stable, I got it a few days ago, and on gts, you have to wait another 5 months until F42 is released, and then you’ll update to F41.

gts is perfect for those who don’t need the very latest features, and want something more chill with fewer surprises.

And the other benefits of uBlue/ Atomic also apply of course, like better hardware enablement, QoL tweaks, automatic staged updates, and much more.

9.5/10, can absolutely recommend!

I recommend you Aurora. It is basically Bazzite, which you already suggested, but without gaming stuff.

Why do I recommend you that?

• The auto updates are amazing. Don’t disable them. It isn’t like on Windows, where it just randomly says “Updating, please don’t shut down your PC” midst working. They get just staged, so they are only applied passively on the next boot. You don’t notice them.
• Rollbacks: If an update introduced breaking bugs or whatever, you can just keep holding the space bar while booting, and you can select the image from yesterday. Everything is left how it was yesterday. You probably never have to use that feature anyway, the system is super reliable.
• The release schedule. This one is the most important aspect for your case. uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin, etc.) started offering different variants/ tags if the same image. There’s now a GTS variant around, which uses the last big release of Fedora, which is still kept up to date maintenance wise. So, you are always half a year behind in terms of new features, but it has been tested for half a year more than regular Fedora or the other images. When you choose the more conservative GTS variant, you’ll get way fewer surprises.

After installation, you can hop into the terminal and use the ujust rebase-helper, where you can select which image variant you want to have

• latest: synchronous with Fedora
• stable (default): features are two weeks behind
• gts: already said, last release, but still secure and more polished.

I think it is the perfect balance for you between “Debian is too stale” and “Fedora and many other distros change too often”.

Fedora Atomic, especially Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora.

Nearly unbreakable, very reliable and stable in everyday use, needs no maintenance (updates itself, etc.) and more!

I chose to continue with my current setup until I get the time and motivation to upgrade.

I will build a new server from scratch. For that, I bought an used mainboard for a few bucks, which has 6 SATA slots.

You won’t need any additional driver, since, as you already said, it is already included in the kernel.

However, as owner of a RX6600, I can tell you that the GPU will be quite loud sometimes. I can recommend you to check out LACT, which let’s you define fan curves, which makes it A LOT less noisy.

Your case sounds like a perfect fit for Bazzite or Aurora.

• Both come already set up ootb, with all quality of life tweaks you want and need.
• They are image based distros (“immutable”), so you mainly work in your /var/ and /home/ directory, and all the other stuff is untouched and clean.
• They are very modern, getting the same updates at the same time as upstream Fedora.
• Running Ollama is just one ujust command away, many complex things are made easier with those commands
• You probably won’t get a lot more performance I believe. At least when I switched from regular Fedora/ Silverblue to Bazzite, I didn’t notice many more FPS in games for example.

It’s a mastodon post where “Fedora” has a hashtag, and then it is followed by “Linux 41…”. The title should say “Fedora Linux 41 will be released on October 29”

For the beginning, I would recommend you to stick to a more popular Distro, like Mint, Fedora, Debian, and therelike.

Many niche distros, like CachyOS, are more tailored towards advanced users who know what they’re up to, or for special use cases, like TailsOS for extreme privacy (e.g. buying drugs, journalism, etc., it’s also commonly installed on an USB stick for portability and non-persistency).

With Fedora or Mint you get way more community support and resources in case something doesn’t work as expected for you.

They’re also (mostly) identical performance wise.

For gaming, I would recommend you Bazzite, which gives you a first class gaming experience, and is extremely robust due to it being a completely new kind of distro. It also has the Nvidia-drivers already baked in if chosen, which makes it more reliable.

But regular Fedora (especially the KDE spin) or other common distros are perfectly fine too for that.

I’ve had this happen more often than I’d like to admit.

There were quite a few instances where I just couldn’t game in the evening after turning on my PC, mostly because of my power supply (outages while updating, unstable grid, damaged PSU and hard drive, etc.) and my ability to shoot myself in the foot in regards to my IT skills.

I imagined spending my friday evening differently than chrooting my install from another USB more often than I’d like to admit. At least Linux is repairable, good luck trying that with Windows…

Now, thankfully, I live in another house with a landlord that actually cares that I don’t get electrocuted in my shower, and I don’t have those problems anymore. I also don’t tinker as much with my OS anymore, at least not much.

Still, Fedora Atomic feels way more robust and less buggy than regular Fedora, especially KDE. And the QoL tweaks from uBlue are great too!

Probably Bluefin-DX.

The “DX” stands for developer experience. It’s a variant of uBlue/ Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) with a lot of added programming tools like Brew, Nix, IDEs, local LLMs, and more.

You can read more about it on the website.

There’s also Aurora, which is the same, but with KDE instead of Gnome.

The dx-images are meant to be a plug-and-play solution for developers. You just install it, share your container config to your project colleagues, and go. Don’t worry about not being able to work because of a bad update or some misalignments in your package manager broke your OS. Most stuff is containerised, and if your host breaks, you can just roll back, because the system is basically powered by git.

I’m no developer, but I use the regular variant for casual purposes (no specific tasks, mostly browser) on my laptop, and Bazzite (also very similar, but gaming focused) on my desktop, and both are wonderful! They’re the most boring distro/ OS I’ve used yet, and that’s great. They’re immutable/ image based and always work reliably.

I can really recommend them for a lot of people, from ranging from IT professionals to my mum.

I totally understand your wish, absolutely valid. From what I know Mint supports secure boot.

There aren’t many things that prevent that, but one might be the Nvidia driver. Were you able to boot into Mint and install it or similar things? Or did you just get greeted by the error message?

Maybe try downloading the image again and reflash it with another tool (e.g. Fedora Media Writer instead of Etcher) on another USB if you have one. It might be totally possible that your .iso did get corrupted in the process. And then do the whole process again.

I believe I had something similar a long time ago when I aborted the download and then resumed it, or when I pulled the USB too quickly without safely ejecting it beforehand.

I don’t use Mint, but secure boot is something that usually works by default on most distros.