Practice in a VM and see for yourself! I did that, set everything up, and ultimately decided it was more system admin detail than I wanted to take on. But as far as ease goes, it’s not especially hard, there’s just not much in the way of hand-holding or preset configs, and you’ll likely find there’s a lot of preinstalled drivers and things you take for granted.

Bluefin is essentially Aurora with Gnome, and Bazzite has a Gnome version, so if that’s more your cup of tea, it’s out there!

Tried Aurora in a VM, and while it ran like shit (probably a VM issue, not Aurora’s), I was shocked that it reported updates, and by the next boot, it had already updated everything.

I run Bazzite on a laptop, so they’re similar, but Aurora really felt clean, polished, and ready for general use.

Weird. I would be interested to know what actually happened, but I am not smart enough to troubleshoot hardware to that degree! At least you found something that works.

TBH, Red Hat focusing their attention on business isn’t that problematic for me. RHEL is specifically for businesses, and Red Hat needs to make money to keep operating. Kind of a necessary evil, if you could consider that evil. However, I completely understand why the capitalist realm makes average people squirm.

But that said, I usually prefer community projects myself (Fedora spins included), since they tend to have modified setups that are more in line with what regular users would want or need.

Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.

I’ve personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they’ve come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.

I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!

Good to have the facts straight. It’s creepy enough on its own without inventing details.

One of these days, I’ll have to give Universal Blue a look for general computing. Bazzite is excellent, but I don’t imagine my MiL is going to care about having Steam and gamescope installed out of the box, should I ever have to do a fresh install for her.

Curious how your atomic distro broke, since you can rollback and rebase pretty easily after a problematic update. I’m running Bazzite on a 10yo laptop, and it’s been great; I even rebased to a completely different DE, then did a rollback when I decided it didn’t work for me.

Not implying anything, but why don’t you trust Red Hat? Because they’re a big company, or because of some other reason?

Podman, from what I can tell, is the result of people wanting a wishlist of fixes/upgrades from Docker and being met with hostility at the notion.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/24/how-to-run-systemd-in-a-container#enter_podman

• Castle Crashers is a classic multiplayer beat-em-up. Plays great on Proton (if that’s important).
• Lost Castle is in a similar vein, though more roguelike.
• River City Girls (and sequels) is either great arcade brawler.
• Neurovoider

Great indie co-op games:

• Deep Rock Galactic. No split screen, but endlessly repayable with goals and targets in each mission. Also fun in solo.
• Caveblazers
• Guacamelee
• Tunche

Upcoming games to consider:

• Wizard of Legend 2

Great writeup! I have a Brother laser printer, too, and it never occurred to me that I’d need to worry about compatibility when I fully migrate (and at least three immutable distros have been in my top five candidates).

Something else for me to keep in mind!

It’s more the other edge of immutable distros, in this particular case. The entire point is that the system files can’t be modified, but that means working within those restrictions via layering can be tricky in certain cases.

Agreed. Depending on the business sector, the PR damage could be worse than the cost of litigation.

My company has a very expensive software product they sell to other businesses (to the tune of millions of dollars a year per customer), and the cost is a hurdle the salespeople have to overcome. If there was litigation against them over trampling another business, that doesn’t exactly instill confidence in a trustworthy business relationship. So they pay their licensing costs.

I’ve read that some people are going back to simpler tech stacks, and it feels like they’re just leaving money on the table if that demographic continues to grow.

Who knows, though? Maybe somebody new will fill in that niche.

TBH, I use Powershell on my Windows install, and they’ve made some good improvements over the years. I forget that it also works on Linux.

Shame v1.0 ships with new installations, and you have to manually go out and install the latest versions to get the benefits. Dunno why MS doesn’t just automatically update it with everything else.

Or it could be as simple as forgetting to renew the domain registration. Maybe they’ll make a statement