themadcodger

Bazzite is just kinoite / silverblue repackaged as Universal Blue, and then modified to preinstall some qol apps and settings. So if you like the original, but don’t want to start with a blank slate, want the nice things out of the box, start with Bazzite/bluefin/aurora (gaming/gnome/KDE).

For people who know what they’re doing/want, starting blank slate makes sense. For newbies or people who don’t feel like dealing with that 🙋🏼‍♂️ the latter is a better recommendation imho

Okay good, you also included Aurora. I agree almost completely with your previous post that mint is outdated, and an immutable is much better for someone who has no idea what they’re doing. No reason to blanket recommend Bazzite, hence the aurora comment.

I’m on Bluefin though, so that’s where we disagree 😏 Don’t know what it is but I’ve never liked KDE.

Yeah, honestly I don’t get all the love for mint whenever this question comes up. Bazzite’s a good choice, I’m running Bluefin it’s sister (same thing but not geared toward gamers) and it’s been great from a set it and forget it perspective. One caution is that they don’t always play nice with dual booting, so make sure you do your due diligence backing up what’s important to you.

Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.

Yeah, I thought the main devs were Latvian 🤔

Someone else mentioned it, but another vote for Aurora-dx (-dx for the developer version). It’ll give you the KDE experience without having to worry about your underlying system, leaving you time to work on software dev in a containerized environment of your choosing. Arch is great if you want to customize and tinker with everything, but given your parameters, I think not worrying about that bit will make your life easier as you focus on what’s more important to you. As long as you reboot your computer from time to time, you’ll always have the latest version and can rollback easily if something goes wrong.

And as is tradition with Linux, it’s not like you have to use whatever you decide forever. Distro hopping is a time-honored tradition!

It’s not the exact same (a 1:1 replacement) but have you looked at Logseq as an alternative to Obsidian. It is open source and serves a lot of the same needs as a wiki-style editor, but may not be exactly what you need in Obsidian

There are dozens of us! But yeah, same.

I just discovered bat and eza, which were already installed, along with fd though I haven’t played with that one yet. I’ve really liked the first two at least

Welcome to distro hopping! If at some point in the future you want to try another out but don’t want to start from scratch, there are ways to demo them to get a feel and see if it’s something you’d like to take the effort to wipe and install.

If it makes you feel any better it sort of is Fedora. Fedora has both original and atomic flavors. Someone took the atomic flavor of Fedora (which comes as a blank slate) and added in some quality of life changes. Nothing permanent, just tweaking some settings and preinstalling some programs. And then called it as Aurora.

And the only difference between Aurora and Bluefin is KDE (very customizable and Windows like) vs Gnome (customizable through widgets, but not enough if you’re a power tweaker and more of a Mac style desktop environments). And Bazzite is the same, but gamer focused (I installed it on my steamdeck).

Yeah, seconded on Tailscale. I love how easy it is to get working. Only fear is the recent announcement of venture funding and future enshitification, but right now it’s amazing.

Yeah, I didn’t want to be not supportive of your choice of distros, but my immediate thought was not Ubuntu… I use it headless for some homelab servers, but nowadays as far as desktops go, Ubuntu is not it.

Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework, and it has been pretty set it and forget it. They’re all “atomic” desktops in that it’s hard to be able change the underlaying important parts of your computer, while you have free reign on all the bits that aren’t important to keep the lights on. Updates happen frequently, but don’t touch your files on top, so it’s always the latest, and if something does break, you can easily boot up into the last image you were on.

If you’re not looking to tweak your computer too much and just want it to run, I’d recommend Aurora or Bluefin depending on your desktop preferences.

Aw, Mandrake! I didn’t know what I was doing back then and chose it because of the root. Stuck with it until Ubuntu came out a bit later.

I have Bazzite on my steam deck and Bluefin on my laptop and have been very happy with them. The atomic part is great for not messing things up as a noob, but if OP does decide to dual boot then these distros won’t be the best choice as they don’t play well with other distros.

Yup, that’s exactly it. Booting to a USB drive doesn’t change anything on your laptop until you tell it to, like by telling it to install. So there’s no harm in doing a dry run nowish. If you’re successful, it’ll boot into the USB drive, you’ll know you can do it, and then just reboot without the USB drive and everything is back to normal. If you do it incorrectly, same thing: just reboot without the USB drive and everything is back to how you left it.

Once you get it, you’ll be ready to go when you get your new laptop. But you can ask questions along the way and the real deal will be less stressful. Up to you though!

Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with default SteamOS. It doesn’t have updates as often as Bazzite, but if you’re happy with it, it’s fine to leave it. I had some trouble getting it to work with my dock when I wanted to use a monitor and keyboard, and since I was already using Bazzite’s cousin on my laptop I switched over and it everything just worked. I’m a fan of the work they’re doing.

Starting with a brand new computer is a good way to go because nothing to lose, and if you have trouble on install, nothing lost starting over.

One thing you can start figuring out now is how to boot from a USB drive in windows. This was just a quick google search, but getting the computer to boot from the USB drive and not where it normally boots will probably be the hardest part. After you boot into the USB drive, the rest is fairly straightforward. So maybe start looking into that while you wait 🤷🏼‍♂️

I guess in case no one else mentioned anywhere, when you install Bazzite (or any distro) it will wipe everything and you will start from scratch, so make sure your important stuff is saved elsewhere before you begin. Same with steamdeck. But one nice thing about Bazzite is that since it’s made by gamers for gamers, it has a lot of the things you’ll need preinstalled, or like emudeck you can just click to install it through their portal, so it should be minimal hassle.

You can do it right now and see what happens. Go to Bazzite.gg and go to the download section. It just wants to know where you’re installing it so it knows what version to give you to download. Installing to a laptop will be a different file than installing to your steamdeck.

And since you shut down nightly you’d always have the most current version when you boot up the next day. But that only applies to atomic (formerly called immutable) distros like Bazzite. If you go Mint, which isn’t atomic/immutable, that won’t be the case and you’ll have to stay on top of updating.

It’s early still, so you have plenty of time to do some research and when you’re ready ask the questions you still don’t understand and generally we’re pretty helpful around here. 😁

I touched on this elsewhere, but seeing your comment here… sort of.

iso image is like a .zip it’s a specific type of file… one that opens into a larger image, namely your entire distro. So you could install windows with an iso file. In order to be useful though, you need to get it onto a flash drive, but not just dragging and dropping. Programs like Rufus, mentioned elsewhere, will take that iso of Bazzite and open it onto the flash drive in a way that the computer will be able to read it later and do something with it.

After you have a working flash drive, you do not boot windows like normal and run the installer from a USB. You’ll have to figure out how to tell your laptop (different but similar for each brand of laptop) to boot from the USB. This usually involves having the USB in the drive, restarting your computer and hitting a specific key to tell it not to boot normally to windows, but instead boot from the flash drive.

I haven’t used Windows in a while and I think there’s also a way to restart windows and tell it to boot from USB as you’re exiting. But that’s what you’ll have to figure out for your specific device. That’ll be true no matter what you end up installing.