I am considering moving away from Ubuntu, but I haven’t tried other distributions for years. I started on Linux Mint Cinnamon back in 2012, but switched to Ubuntu when I built my current PC in 2020 because I wanted more up-to-date packages. Now I am faced with needing to replace my SSD which gives me reason enough to install a new distro. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with 32G of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, so I would need something that plays nicely with nvidia. I routinely use libreoffice, digikam, gimp, virtualbox, bambu studio, sublime text, filezilla, thunderbird, minecraft, steam, Open WebUI and Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111). I liked Ubuntu because it was familiar, fairly easy to customize, and everything was kept fairly well up to date. I am not a big fan of snap, and I would prefer a more logical and unified package management system. I was wondering if you all had some recommendations for me. Thanks
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!
Thank you very much for the recommendations! Out of curiosity, what are the benefits of using say bluefin over just plain fedora? I should also add that I prefer a long term support installation because I don’t reinstall very often. Thanks again
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.
That was a supremely enlightening explanation! I’m installing bluefin in a vbox to check it out and ordering a new SSD. Thank you!
I’m also on Bluefin for my daily driver and Bazzite for my Steam Deck. I love it because the important part is set and forget it, and the part I tinker with is separate from the part that keeps things running. And if an update borks something, you can just revert to the image you came from.
One thing to keep in mind with this is it’s “a new way” so expect hickups. I use Bazzite on my living room PC, and have had:
- Installation of software fail because
yumwasn’t supported for what I wanted to do - Keys for updates get rotated by maintainers, causing all updates to fail without me realizing
I do love Bazzite, and just recommended it in another thread, but I would not run it on my workhorse.
- Installation of software fail because
I use Aurora (the KDE version) as a software dev/ gaming machine. It’s great!
fedora has a reputation for being bleeding edge for red hat based distros and atomic is an extension of that bleeding edge but in a particular way; i’ve been considering it myself because their atomic releases use rpm-ostree and i’m hoping that it provides some easy answers for package management.
Bluefin and all the Universal Blue spins are atomic, based on Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue. Atomic or immutable being the big difference from normal Fedora. The Ublue spins just add onto the base atmoic distros with extra compatibility mostly.
Bluefin/Bazzite/Aurora are immutable, atomic versions of Fedora. I’ll probably explain it wrong but they’re more secured than normal Linux flavors and you get several copies of your core system files, so when you inevitably fuck something up, you roll back to the previous version and undo your mistake.
I’ve only just moved over to Bazzite in the last 6 months or so, so I’m no expert, but it’s been a cinch to get most games running.
You can simply rebase with atomic fedora. No need to reinstall when switching atomic distros
I second this. uBlue is amazing if you want something that just works and doesn’t break.
Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you’re into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you’ve been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro’s probably easier than you think.
I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster… and I’m still running that install to this day. I’m typing this from it!
In practice I’ve found Arch’s always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there’s containers for the few stubborn “only works on this exact version of Ubuntu” cases but it’s pretty rare.
I’ve been mostly happy with Bazzite (Fedora based) but sometimes the immutability aspect can be frustrating. I might say any old distro with a regular Timeshift backup is good enough. OP already said they tried Mint, which works well with Timeshift, and I don’t know if it’s improved with it’s update frequency.
Bazzite drive me nuts. It’s pretty good out of the box but I had to do some crazy shit to make stuff work for my friend that’s just starting on Linux.
I measured it, I was able to install like 2GB worth of Arch updates in the time it took to
rpm-ostree kargs --append. Waiting 5 minutes to install a tiny <1MB utility package gets annoying fast. It’s nice to be able to just tell my friend to boot the last generation though. Tradeoffs.It runs great otherwise though, I see the appeal especially for new users and fixed hardware like the handhelds. Just works.
Not sure I’ve seen the same latency with installing things but I’ve also layered very little. Doing things the immutable way is definitely more challenging but I don’t mind the challenge. I think I have more fun configuring than actually using my system.
I’m using OpenSuSE Tumbleweed and can recommend that. It’s user friendly, especially with the powerful Yast tools for configuring a lot of things. I’m using KDE but it does have a good Gnome spin.
All of the tools you’re using will work without issue, and I have an Nvidia 3070 which I’ve set up without issue with the official Nvidia drivers. I game a fair bit with steam and everything works well.
If you’re not a fan of rolling release then OpenSuSE Leap is the same but point release.
OpenSuSE has good official repos and large variety of community repos, plus Flatpak if you need it. The only difficulties I’ve had are with Python which is installed in a weird way to allow multiple versions to be installed for devs - it can be fiddly installing python software dependencies into the right places, especially if they want you using pip.
Also you said you use VirtualBox - I used to use it but have switched to KVM and strongly recommend it. Guest systems - particularly Linux guests - work better in KVM. Worth exploring in your next system - in OpenSuSE it’s been a doddle to set up but should be in most systems.
I see people recommending immutable desktops - I’d be cautious about switching your desktop to that if you don’t have experience of that kind of system. They have strengths but definite drawbacks too. I’d try another distro not too disimilar to Ubuntu before exploring the world of immutable distros.
Maybe try an immutable system in a Virutal machine. I’ve played a bit with them and they’ve not been for me - too locked down and if you like to tinker or try niche things you’ll find yourself fighting the OS. Also Flatpak is convenient but it’s not the ideal or most secure way to be running all your software, and lots of software isn’t available as Flatpak.
And for Nix, it is very good but can be used on many distros. You can get another traditional distro and try it out - if you like it by all means switch to NixOS but you don’t have to use NixOS to use Nix. Again it seems too big of a leap to go all in to that on your main desktop. I’d make a smaller change unless you’re open to reinstalling your main desktop a few times trialling bigger shifts.
OpenSUSE doesn’t get recommended enough. Great distro I’ve settled with permanently after trying all the popular ones.
I recommend Fedora. It’s user friendly and nice to use.
Yeah considering OP already uses mostly open software and prefers things to be up to date I think fedora is a good option. If they use gnome then flatpak might suit them nicely, it has matured nicely. Only thing is that it won’t be as familiar to them coming from Ubuntu and its derivatives, but I don’t think it’s that tough of a transition to make.
Since you have experience on Linux, why not Arch Linux. It’s not that hard-to-master-install from the past since “archinstall” exists.
And you get a system with all your wishes of combinations that exist in the linux world. And the best well documented Wiki from Arch stays at your side.
Alternative would be fedora, easiest installer of all. And their logic of “just all firmwares, can’t fail” should help nvidia users out-of-the-box.
+1 for Arch… I use EndeavourOS.
… btw
Highly recommend Pop_OS. It’s Ubuntu minus the bad parts, like snap. Been running it a couple years now and had few issues.
Debian.
You know
apt, it will be familiar, but more raw for you to play with, and no snap.A fun activity would be to set up
dotfilesof your home directory, and then write a set of scripts to do all of the things you would typically do to set things up (software,gsettingspreferences, etc).Then, if you decide to change from Debian to something else based on Debian (sooo many distros) in the future, your scripts will work out of the box getting you set up in minutes.
Edit: You can also try distros at: https://distrosea.com/
I went with PoP! OS because it plays nice with Nvidia but I think everything does that nowdays.
The switchable tiling window manager and an actually good gnome interface is reason enough to try it out.
I’m on Pop simply for Pop Shell at this point. Really looking forward to Cosmic getting (more) done.
Now I am faced with needing to replace my SSD which gives me reason enough to install a new distro.
Replacing an SSD is pretty simple on Linux; just copy over the data, adjust the partitions, select the new drive in UEFI/BIOS. If you want to try a different distro, any time is good, but a new SSD doesn’t require a reinstall.
My advice from my distro-hopping days is to dual-boot with potential new distros (unless space is at a premium). I just made sure to share important folders like /home/. That way, if I didn’t like my new setup, I could quickly fall-back to the old.
Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can use Debian testing repos for more updated packages and kernels if you want. Also, it seems like more and more applications are adopting flatpak anyway.
Stay with Ubuntu LTS or go Debian.
Debian always wins.
This.
Always advocating for that but Aeon Desktop (immutable OpenSUSE) has been great for me: rock solid base system, latest Gnome desktop, all the apps in Flatpak. Distrobox for all the terminal applications needs works better for me than the toolbox on systems like Silverblue. Give it a try!
For good out-of-the-box nvidia support, I recommend Bazzite.
I tried Bazzite, but I had trouble getting a couple of my school apps to run. VMware Workstation wouldn’t install the kernel modules it needs, and I couldn’t find an installation guide. Getting it to run on boring Fedora took me a lot of tries, to be honest. I wish I could use literally any other hypervisor, but my teachers kinda hate me for not using Windows, so…
Standard fedora
Fedora or opensuse, both works for me equally well but more software availability with fedora
In my experience, these 2 are the endgame for distrohoppers. You either end on Tumbleweed or on Fedora. I ended up on Fedora personally, but they are both great in tgeir own ways.
By “the endgame”, I mean that’s what ends their distrohopping.
