with RPM Fusion

The community-led Terra repository is also worth mentioning in this context.

I wonder if openSUSE has any third party repositories worth mentioning.

https://distrochooser.de/en/d5b4e0067841/

Your results suggest that Fedora is an equally viable alternative.

Regardless, ask yourself the following question: Do you need the vastness that a repository like the AUR provides?

• Like, are you sure that the repositories of Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed don’t contain the packages that you need?
• Or…, is it more about liberation? Whatever the future might throw at you, you’re confident that the AUR will provide you. But…, that raises another question: are you even exotic in your software needs to begin with?

The above (sub)question(s) will (hopefully) help you to make an informed decision. Furthermore, please feel free to discuss them openly in hopes that others might chime in.

Anyhow, I foresee either one of the following:

• You actually acknowledge (or come to the revelation) that the repositories of Fedora and/or openSUSE (without going into user repositories^[1]) are sufficient for you. Thus, becoming a viable destination.
• The previous option does not happen, simply because your software needs are not contained within their respective repositories. In that case, I’d seriously consider to adopt nix (as a package manager on whatever distro you go for) or perhaps even NixOS if you want to go all-in. The excellent nixpkgs repository is the only one that puts the AUR to shame. And -more importantly within our current discussion- it’s not a user repository, but instead the official one. And thus comes with all the security bells and whistles you’d expect.

Fam, if I may, I’ll be a bit abrasive and blunt for the sake of brevity. So, without further ado.

Ubuntu 24.04

(I’ll assume this is on GNOME.) First of, in terms of Wayland development, that build is from the Bronze Age. The associated issue tracker has been closed since last year, even if you don’t like the solution GNOME has come up with. Which, gets us to the second point; please don’t blame the Wayland ecosystem as a whole whenever you find a fault within a Wayland compositor. If, instead, you would have been on KDE Plasma back then, you’d have found that PTT was supported. Even if it was basically a hack for the sake of UX. Thankfully, KDE Plasma has recently merged a proper implementation that’s slated for its 6.7 release.

I’ll grant you that the Wayland ecosystem hasn’t fully matured yet. But it’s undeniable that it already provides a better experience than its predecessor for the vast majority of users.

The very same people that actually worked on X11. Wayland is basically X12.

The project recognized that a complete redesign was required and they followed through.

Wayland is (part of) the modern solution to the problem that was previously tackled by X11. As such, it comes with improved security (read: keyloggers no longer have a field day) and features (read: HDR, VRR and no screen tearing) that one might expect in 2026. Furthermore, it breaks up the monolith of X11 and thus adheres better to the Unix Philosophy^[1] (if that happens to be something you care about). Finally, Wayland has basically come (as part of the plan) to replace X11. So, it will continue to improve as a platform while X11 will remain stagnant.

In the current landscape in which Wayland has (finally) fulfilled (most of) its promises, X11’s lifeline are the edge cases in which (for a myriad of different reasons) the Wayland ecosystem hasn’t reached full feature-parity yet. And Wayland’s trajectory would suggest that it’s only a matter of time until those have been ironed out as well.

TL;DR: Use Wayland. Most of the ecosystem has already adopted it and what remains is actively in the process of doing so.

FWIW, there’s also BlueBuild and it’s used by projects like secureblue for setting up their custom images.

Disclaimer: This is obviously subjective. YMMV.

Pros:

• It’s open source.
• It is not actively spying on me.
• Downloading software from a package repository is so much better than grabbing the install file through your favorite internet browser.
• The OS does what I want. And does not do anything I don’t want.
• Freedom to do whatever you want with your OS. For example, yesterday I literally swapped out my desktop environment for another. M$ doesn’t offer this freedom.
• On that note, the workflows that WMs allow are absolutely chef’s kiss. Also a boon to your productivity. They look gorgeous as well.
• I don’t have to deal with criminally long updates anymore. No multiple reboots for updates either.
• It has made me love the terminal.
• Software development is so much better on Linux.
• I don’t know why…, but it feels like I got more time 😅. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if my mental health has also improved since I’ve started using Linux.

Cons:

• No Windows Defender. Yes I said it. Even if it hoards/saps a lot of resources. While it is a retrofit solution to combat how easy it is to get malware on M$, I can’t deny how much I’d have loved something similar on Linux. ClamAV simply can’t compare.
• Some software regard Linux-users as second-class citizens. Anecdotally, Davinci Resolve worked pretty nice on Windows. On Linux, it didn’t. Instead, it has brought me sorrow and agony 😭.
• Some hardware regard Linux-users as second-class citizens. For example, the ThinkPad I bought last year has worked absolutely lovely on Linux. But my previous laptop, a HP Pavilion, had some glaring issues that got never fixed…

what if any do you miss from windows?

Windows Defender.

I’ve been a GNOME user ever since I made the switch to Linux. Though, like literally over the last couple of days, I’ve been DE/WM-hopping.

The first address was Sway, but it felt (kinda) archaic… And while I’m positive that I’d be able to make it work, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was worth the effort 😅.

So, not long after, I couldn’t bear it anymore and switched to COSMIC. So far, I’m pretty content with it. GNOME required about half a dozen extensions to properly bend to my will. With COSMIC, it pretty much gets there without any external add-ons.

Thanks! Your comment prompted me to check out this entry in uBlock Origin’s documentation that also underlines why Firefox(-based browsers) work better for the purposes of content-blocking.

So I guess it comes down to your threat model and desired experience.

Can’t agree more.

all chromium based browsers are now inherently more vulnerable to malware thanks to google.

Could you explain why? While at it, would you be so kind to mention why security-focused projects like GrapheneOS and secureblue stick to Chromium-based browsers despite that?

should i switch to linux?

So, as this is a Linux community, do you expect anything but an astounding “Yes!”?

Going through the rest of your post, you’d have to be cautious with the Nvidia GPU. It can go anywhere from working almost seamlessly without any tinkering to causing nigh-unsolvable problems you (regretfully) might have to work around.

But, aside from that, you should be pretty much good to go.

what setup do you have for a keyboard driven workflow in your browser and what are your reasons for it.

One might argue I’m a bit paranoid on security. Hence, Trivalent is my preferred browser on Desktop Linux. Which leaves Vimium as my only option… And that’s exactly what I use 😅.

Thank you very much for the elaborate answer!

If I’d have to distill your points, they mostly seem related to documention. Which is unfortunate. Would you say that’s a fair take?

This is mostly a matter of maturity and whether there is tooling to make this possible. As such, it’s not surprising that only the more established atomic distros are part of the conversation. Those^[1] being Fedora Atomic and NixOS.

Besides Bazzite, Playtron GameOS is also based on Fedora Atomic.

As for NixOS-based gaming distros, there’s Jovian NixOS and GLF OS.

FWIW, ChimeraOS is IIRC a notable exception to the above.

Note that none of these come close to Bazzite community-wise*.

I found the following on their Discord:

1. try going to neverssl.com
2. try ujust dns-selector reset, then try neverssl.com again
3. try a non-Trivalent browser (e.g. Epiphany), then try neverssl.com again

I think the main problem is that immutable distros haven’t thought things through from the beginning.

I think I understand why you might have that feeling, but I think it’s more complex than that.

Say, we look at Fedora Atomic, as that’s the atomic distro I’m most familiar with. At inception, it offered the following (‘staggered’) three-way:

• Flatpak, if it’s available (and if it works nicely).
• Toolbx, if the above didn’t work (and if it works nicely).
• rpm-ostree, if the above didn’t work. Basically your fail-safe.

So AFAIU, as long as you didn’t rpm-ostree your whole system, it was a ‘win’ for the atomic model.

You might argue that their priority should have been the development of an all-encompassing package manager that works (almost) as sleek any other one. And only after that’s been (somewhat) completed, should they have shipped a system built around it. However, the trouble it has been taking Ubuntu to launch its Core Desktop since its announcement, definitely suggests that building an OS around a more complete (and complex) package manager poses its own set of challenges^[1]. Contrast that to Fedora and openSUSE, both of which were able to launch their respective atomic distros for Desktop Linux in a more timely fashion.

If snap has a limitation, they just update snap to not have the limitation rather than brining in another package manager.

I think you’re making a category error. If Snap chooses to replace your complete OS, then it makes sense to get rid of any limitations. Because that’s in scope of its intended design. Flatpak, from my understanding, simply tries to become for Desktop Linux what the App Store and Google Play are for iOS and Android respectively. Hence, it doesn’t make much sense to blame it for what is out of its scope. Similarly to how it wouldn’t make any sense to scold VLC because it doesn’t play your Windows games. Here, I explicitly named Flatpak, but note that this principle applies to basically any other alternative package manager we (tend to) find on atomic distros.

Consequently, therefore, perhaps the distros are to be blamed for shipping lackluster package managers instead of introducing one-to-one replacements of the traditional ones. But I think this is just a very complex problem 😅. And I suppose you knew that already…

Hmm…, I didn’t get that from your first response. But thank you for clarifying!

Once you start getting into the territory of layering new tools/drivers/whatever on top, you’re reintroducing the statefulness that the atomicity was supposed to eliminate.

I agree with your sentiment overall, but with a lot of nuance. I’d rather formulate it purposely ambiguous as follows: Once you start getting into the territory of modifying stuff, you might reintroduce some of the statefulness that the paradigm was supposed to eliminate.

I am aware that this ambiguity invites clarity and elaboration. And therefore I’d like to offer my genuine apologies for not responding to said invitation. However, I hope that this excellently written blogpost suffices in conveying how systems can be both stateless and ever-mutable.

But to me the whole sysext thing is actually a compelling argument for why Linux power users (i.e. most Linux users on lemmy) aren’t suited to immutable distros.

Sorry, but I don’t see why. Btw, I’m pretty well-versed in immutable atomic distros. So, please don’t feel the need to explain how it works.

When something as fundamental as git requires multiple obscure commands to install

I think you’re overstating the bold part.

Instead of <package-manager> install <package>, it becomes sysextmgrcli install <package> and systemd-sysext merge. I understand that going from a single command to two commands is effectively doubling the effort. But, as systextmgrcli is a horribly long name to invoke (and why I suspect it will change eventually), you might want to alias that anyways. At which point, creating a function within your .bashrc to streamline that to a single command shouldn’t be too much to ask for a power user.

As for the obscure part, sysextmgrcli is the tool that’s being introduced. Hence, it would be rather oxymoronic to expect that it’s anything but obscure. Beyond that, its usage seems reasonably sane and relatively standard. Very common arguments like list, install and update that are found on basically every other package manager work as expected. So, honestly, I don’t see the problem.

As for the second command, while systemd-sysext has been a part of systemd since its v248 release over five years ago, Desktop Linux users haven’t had much use for it yet. Though, thankfully, learning that systemd-sysext merge is done after installing a system extension and systemd-sysext unmerge is done for uninstalling a system extension shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Flatpak, docker, and nix cover a lot of things but have their annoying edge cases and paper cuts, especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps.

I’m still pretty new to nix - I’ve only recently started experimenting within a NixOS-loaded VM. So, please pardon me for my ignorance. But would you be so kind to point me towards its “annoying edge cases and paper cuts especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps”? Thank you in advance :) !

Very cool to see that System Extensions are being adopted and that the tooling is improving to reflect that!

This reminds me of the sysexts-manager project, which is worked on by a Fedora Atomic maintainer.