I’ve never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.

That’s because of active directory. It makes managing hundreds of users, across as many devices, in a centralized manner, easier. You make a user for the person with the intended access scheme, hand them a random laptop imaged from a master system OS, and off they go with access to all the software and tools tied to their user login. There’s no similar alternative with a robust support service for Linux clients. If there were, then changing a culture to Linux clients wouldn’t have so much friction.

Go atomic immutable. Is it different? Yes. But the system is always updated without any package hell. Makes managing a system for others extremely simple. Bazzite for gamers, aurora for workstations, bluefin if you like Gnome.

Just remember that they didn’t certify macOS for any practical reason, Apple was just weaseling out of a lawsuit and figured that paying the certification was cheaper than damages. I think they lost the certification some time later. Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

They still do. But projects like bluefin are striving to get rid of it entirely. Flatpak installation is not package management, they are containerized applications.

The package manager way of delivering distro management, updates and upgrades is an archaic and dumb idea. Doomed to fail since inception and the reason Linux never broke the 1% of users in forever. It’s a bad model.

Atomic and immutable distribution of an OS is the preferred and successful model for the average user who wants a PC to be a tool and not a hobby on itself. I don’t think the traditional package manager will ever go away. But there are alternatives now.

I’ve tried it. I like that they’re carrying the torch of OpenBoard, but I don’t like that swipe typing requires manually downloading a third party library.

My only gripe with the Samsung keyboard is that their only alternative distribution is Dvorak, and by now I’m 100% a colemak user even on touch screens. So I use open board with swipe typing.

Yeah, that’s absolutely valid. But you run into the same problems again, what the hell is an ostree? Would ask the average gamer. Even some newer changes to bootc will make rpm-ostree unnecessary in the future. Flatpaks are not mandatory even. You could run bluefin or bazzite entirely on appimages.

At least the term cloud native is standardized by the cloud native computing foundation, it has a long story, it’s already known or familiar to a lot of people. And the most important, I think, it is technology agnostic. Even if docker dies and another tech takes its role, or if kubernets are replaced with something else, or even is rpm-ostren is no longer used, cloud native still means the same thing. As for bad smells, that’s just language, words can mean many things at once, we just live with it.

I’m sorry, but it is a software engineering term. Maybe not from the area you are familiar with, but cloud native was the raging buzzword…about 10 years ago on the server side. Now it’s just a standard way to develop software and it’s part of the common parlance. It is the philosophical background, if you will, of snaps, flatpaks, kubernetes, docker, pods. I mean, the entire business model of AWS and dozens of cloud providers, data centers, mass hosting solutions, saas, etc. is based on the cloud native idea. You use the term and everyone in the room knows exactly which principles and development pipeline you’ll use.

Just like all language, it is just a shortcut to convey a complex meaning. Like, I don’t know what distro QE stands for. But that’s not my area of expertise. I bet there’s a good reason it is abbreviated and that you use it on your résumé. It might convey something to a recruiter or not, about what your general expertise and skills could be. Same here, it’s just a term that describes the important and distinctive part of the project. Because for everything else there’s nothing out of the ordinary on bazzite, not even the gaming stuff. The makers don’t even like to call it a distro because they use other people’s distros. What’s unique is the delivery pipeline and the config, and that sounds even worse, marketing wise. I’ll share you some interviews later.

This is an interview with Jorge, who was around here on the thread earlier answering questions.

And here’s an interview on the fedora podcast with bazzite makers.

Start here for everything Universal Blue. Read here to see how the sauce is made.

The buzz word is not aimed at the regular gaming nerd. It is aimed at gaming nerds who are also developers. Universal blue, the project behind Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora, aims to market to developers to use their systems first, on the basis of the tech backend. So then they make the cool FOSS things that the nerd public can use. Cloud native just means that something is engineered and made to make use of the container based devops pipeline.

For example, an atomic immutable OS that is meant to be developed and distributed via the container infrastructure (this is what Universal Blue is). So, instead of working on making an OS the regular way, collecting packages and manually connecting and tidying up absolutely every puzzle piece so it fits together, then pushing it through the installer packaging wizard, etc. This OSs are made by taking an already existing distribution, in this case Fedora atomic distros (but this is by no means mandatory), then customizing some things. Like installing libraries, applications, firmware, kernels and drivers. Then putting it all into a container image, like you would do with a docker or a podman server image. This way, on the user side, they don’t need to install the OS, instead they already have the minimal atomic system handling framework and just copy and boot into that OS image. This automates a lot of the efforts required for bundling and distributing an OS, and it makes new spins on existing distros really fast and efficient to make. It also means that users don’t need to be tech savvy about stuff like directory hierarchies or package management, and updates, installs, upgrades can all be automated to the point of the user barely even noticing them.

On a similar note, these distros, as development workstations, are usually pre-configured to make use of a container based dev pipeline. Everything is flatpacks and development is handled all via docker, pods, etc. Keeping the system clean from the usual development clutter that sediments over time on a traditional development cycle. As a happy coincidence, this makes the dreaded “works on my machine” issue less prevalent, making support of software a tad easier.

Gnome is ugly IMO and the extensions and custom themes to make it pretty break at each and every update. I just don’t bother with it anymore. KDE was customized to my liking once and it stays that way through updates without any failure.

Try Aurora DX (it means the developer edition). It’s KDE but with a Fedora base and immutability. It means that even if an update breaks something (unlikely but still) you will always have a working system available to fall back to. It does mean that development is meant to be done via containers, but I find this solution to be way cleaner and easier to work with than traditional package conflicts madness. Give it a go.

Don’t want to think about your OS? Install Aurora. The hardest decision will be choosing your password. Install instructions are identical to any other Fedora installation. Auto updates to everything, never breaking system with bleeding edge software all the time. Superb documentation, zero maintenance, windows like desktop experience but better. That’s all.

It means nothing, it’s just a paycheck you sign and then you get to say “I certify my OS is Unix”. The little bit more technical part is POSIX compliance but modern OSs are such massive and complex beasts today that those compliances are tiny parts and very slowly but very surely becoming irrelevant over time.

Apple made OSX Unix certified because it was cheap and it got them off the hook from a lawsuit. That’s it.

Bazzite comes with wine all setup by default. KDE’s file managerl can integrate running exe with wine on a default prefix automatically.

Most distributions and DEs already package wine in a set it and forget it configuration. Wine by default has a system wide prefix such that clicking on any exe in the file system automatically runs it on the default prefix. This way of doing things predates wsl by a long time. It is just safer and better practice to setup a new prefix for every software, specially if they are games.

Please remember that no one is taking anything away from you. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. Traditional package managing isn’t going away any time soon. You are safe. Others can have their preferred tech, and you don’t have to like it. It’s ok to have different tastes.

It’s not a flaw. Ostree is a last resort, you should be using containerized software. Layering a package should only be done when strictly necessary and not as the regular way to manage packages. If you need an overtly customized system, you use Nix or universal blue to design your new system declaratively and create your custom image.