I've first used Linux when I got a copy of fedora in some tech magazine on CD in the late 90s. But I'm wayyyyyyy out of touch. What's onyx? I haven't used Linux since Slackware, Debian, and Redhat were popular. Fucking loved that shit though. Learned so much about computers in middle school.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I started around the same time as you, and had a Mac hiatus for a long time. Come back, Linux as a desktop OS is more polished than ever. Since you've been gone a while, you probably aren't familiar with Budgie, but essentially, after GNOME came out with version 3, a lot of people lost their shit because it was a drastic shift in UI workflow. It splintered a lot of people to start new projects that were GTK-based, but not GNOME. Budgie is one of those sort of flavors of desktop environments.
Fedora Onyx is an immutable version of that distro with Budgie as the DE. If you're not familiar with immutable distros (they're not so mainstream yet), they're essentially a special installation where all the system files are read-only.
Hm, what is a benefit of that? Non power users just not fucking shit up?
Also, I have a monster windows PC I built for work (4k and 6k video editing), but I'm probably going to buy a laptop here in a week or so. Just for writing and streaming video in my bedroom. Any suggestions on a simple distro for that? Just need stability, a notepad-like app, and the ability to use a browser, a VPN, and solid video rendering.
Most people using it are pretty hardcore users, actually. Immutable Linux is not quite ready for primetime IMO.
If you haven't chosen your laptop yet, I'd recommend checking out the Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List, and trying to buy from there. Otherwise, your new laptop could be a mixed bag in terms of how well it works.
In terms of distros, I personally think Fedora Linux is the best of all worlds. You get a quick straightforward install, relatively new packages, it has a big user base which helps for support, it has a pretty vanilla GNOME installation, and bugs get fixed quick, because a ton of Red Hat engineers are using it.
For what it's worth, SteamOS - the OS used on the Steam Deck - is also immutable (based on Arch Linux). It seems like that's the main benefit, yeah. You can unlock root access in it for development purposes, but it'll be reset after Valve pushes out an update to SteamOS. Don't know whether that's supported on Fedora's immutable variants.
Fedora's immutable variants are more flexible than SteamOS 3 currently is.
Fedora supports package layering (and the layered packages are reapplied on system image updates), you can pin multiple deployments and switch between them, and the ostree managed /etc is more advanced than the overlayfs setup that SteamOS uses.
SteamOS's simpler approach is perfectly fine for its intended purpose though.
Thanks for letting me know! I've got a lot of experience with SteamOS but not so much the immutable Fedoras. Should give them a try in the future.