I used the big ones, ubuntu, arch, opensuse and (atomic) fedora. Fedora had the nicest out of box experience. Morover, I moved to podman, systemd, selinux, etc. And the atomic version showed me a new workflow with flatpak and distrobox (nowadays, I use nix oftentimes).

The best part about it is that I do not care about the system anymore. I do not even interact with it. I don’t install packages (besides the base layer and minimal modifications that are long lasting like installing openssl for GNOME iirc)

I use mainly flatpaks, if I need aur, I fire up distrobox, or use nix if I want to. And the best part is, I’d have the exact same workflow even without the atomic version. Even on another distro. I do not interact with it much.

Moreover, I am happy with all the choices fedora made with the base package and images. I do not have to do an informed choice like on arch. It just updates whenever I boot my pc. I do not need to read updates, they are just there, somewhere. I do not need to disable snaps or work around weird choices. I just start firefox, vscodium, a terminal and do whatever I want to do.

Edit: I actually wanted to switch back to opensuse just to support it but I guess I’d rather move to nix some day. Maybe with niri and cosmic.

Understandable.

Advertising for a change needs great effort. I’d rather spend the effort in improving gimp, writing down whats missing and how to get there. Adding suppor for affinity won’t improve gimp, does it?

I’d rather support FOSS software

bundling matrix and email would be cool

Difficult. Paperwm/ Niri has the best workflow.

I am looking forward to set niri as compositor on cosmic.

deleted by creator

That’s long overdue. Many removed it in favor of flatpaks. There were still some minor issues with flatpak. I guess those are resolved now

Family Feudora

It makes me sad that you had to spend so much time with this topic. But thank you for publishing it ❤️

You can login with firefox and have the same setup anywhere as well. it’s really convenient to share tabs between mobile and workstation

Mostly fennec (firefox) on android but there are concerning news every half year about firefox. No idea how long I can withstand.

Vanadium is my alternative but it has no (good) browser tab overview (list instead of huge squares). And bottom navigation is sub par as well. Brave would be better in that regard but vanadium is rock solid.

As soon as firefox drops ublock, I’m out. For me, that day is still far away, but I guess it’s inevitable. You can’t trust firefox not chaning their path anymore. :'( .

All distros are fine.

You mentioned gaming. Hence, go for bazzite.

Since OP is sharing it, op should back it up, not you

What are you looking for?

Actually, what OP is referring to should be called GNU/Linux. Here’s a link to do some more research https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Is apple free? No? Then it’s either violating the GNU license or it is not based on it

I’d virtualize windows. For me, it’s way more important to have a good host

It looks really good but I wonder if it is as efficient as niri or paperwm https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-de-tiling-redesign-and-libcosmic-rebasing

Bazzite

The difference between distros are the package manager and choice of default software and settings.

E.g. Debian has no wifi enabled. Hence, ubuntu (which is like debian) is much easier because it’s user friendly. Ubuntu uses a disliked packaging format, snap, which is not used by mint. That’s why people love mint, becaus it’s as easy as ubuntu and has no snaps. Blablabla

Whenever you want to know some linux thing, read the arch wiki and you’ll know more about it.

Distrobox is like a vm, you spin up a distro within your OS with no overhead and can use arch on debian. Or ubuntu on arch. Or fedora on opensuse, or all at the same time because why not?

I’d try https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/ or https://vanillaos.org/ and install most apps as flatpaks. Vanilla is like ubuntu but you don’t mess with the underlying system. Atomic fedora is “the same” but with fedora style. Problems arise at the dev level, not the user level. It should be good to go on your system

Mint vs fedora is completely irrelevant here. GNOME vs KDE is more important and fedora supports both.

Which packages can be installed is also completely irrelevant since you can use nix and distrobox and flatpaks on all distros. Package availability is no reason to choose one distro over another.