verdare

I actually like the assurance of immutability. The main downside is that there’s just less documentation on how to do things, since it’s a very non-standard configuration for a distro.

It’s also annoying having to reboot every time I layer a new package into the system image, but I try to avoid that as much as possible and haven’t had to do it recently.

Adjusting to Flatpaks has also presented some challenges. In theory, I really like what Flatpaks offer in terms of app-level isolation, but some things are still rough around the edges. I’ve encountered at least one app that didn’t obey the system’s dark mode theming… Also, they still haven’t quite figured out a good way to handle GPU drivers, so you can run into compatibility issues between the usage driver in the runtime and the kernel driver in the system image.

In my case, I’ve just had to update and restart the application when this happens, but it might cause problems if you try to roll back the OS image after already updating all your runtimes (resulting in a newer userspace driver trying to talk to an outdated kernel driver).

Yeah, I’ve got a couple extensions as well. I tried out Bazzite and liked some of the changes they made, but wanted something closer to stock Gnome. Ended up just installing Silverblue and adding a few of those extensions back, to taste.

Gnome

I’ve used Ubuntu, Arch, and Void in the past. Ended up settling on Fedora Silverblue for the time being.

I’ve had a hot take for a while now that Linux isn’t “more secure” than other operating systems like a lot of evangelists will claim. I think people get this impression because the user base for desktop Linux has been small enough that no one was writing malware targeted at us.

Unix’s security model was developed in a world where the primary concern was protecting the system from users and protecting users from each other. It wasn’t really designed for single-user systems where the main concern is protecting the user from their own applications.