Easy enough to put a repo on a usb drive if that’s what you want, or indeed if you build the folder structure you can just copy. Fine for the occasional install, if you’re doing it wholesale, Ansible.

Gir! Always nice to see a Zim meme.

Eh, I did 4 or 5 years on Arch, broke a lot, learned a lot, got tired of that and retired to Fedora, now Bazzite. I would recommend Arch or Cachy to someone with technical chops, which is a surprising amount of PC gamers, who wants to get up to speed fast on linux. I’ll recommend ArchWiki regardless. Then there are the others who just want to game with minimal friction, for them, Bazzite. Horses for courses… Hard agree on Ubuntu.

Duh, but it shines in immutable. Enjoy your debian, I like it too, for servers.

It’s AMD to start (7800XT), so if the screens off it uses like 6-8W anyway, then undervolt with LACT.

I think you as yet don’t quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, it’s a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer it’s a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? That’s a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.

There’s tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isn’t there, it’s in a distrobox Arch in AUR and you can integrate it as an application into the main OS. Stuff that truly needs system level access, like zsh and intel-undervolt gets layered into the main OS with rpm-ostree. There’s security benefits as well like SELinux, but this post has gone on long enough.

It is so not an iPhone.

My second screen is a laptop (T580), also bazzite, often running moonlight to the big monitor so the main box goes to low power mode when not in use (it’s also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)

This. If you must have rooted containers docker-compose is only a

rpm-ostree install docker-compose

away, but that’s a big ass layer, you’ll feel it every update, and insecure to boot (yes I know docker finally got userspace, but how many times have you seen it used? Everywhere it’s root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every time…). They’re easy to love once you get your head around them.

Agreed, when SteamOS gets more general hardware supporty things will get interesting, but Bazzite is a desktop with superlative Steam support, while SteamOS is more a steam console with desktop support. When people, especially newbs, want to do desktop things with their general purpose machines, on SteamOS they’re using Arch (bleeding edge, lower stability), while Bazzites get Fedora (sharp edge, higher stability and security) which should be a less painful and frustrating experience. Of course if there’s a flatpak (possibly the third step) it’ll be painless on either, and hey, everybody wins (except winblows) in either case.

Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you’re going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.

Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you’re likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It’s part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you’ll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.

I say go for the desktop for grunty work and pick up an older thinkpad for the mobile use case or just remote in with your macbook. I have a T580 (last of the dual batteries, infinite battery life baby), works an absolute treat on linux and next best build quality to a macbook but with a repair manual and massive upgradeability.

Don’t sleep on switching to nvme.

You’ll be wanting sudo ostree admin pin 1 seeing as 0 was broken. Double check with rpm-ostree status.

Proceed to rpm-ostree update, if that does nothing it means 0 is up to date, personally I’d just wait for a new update using the working deployment, but you can blow away 0 and get it again if you’re keen.