I’ve been feeling gushy about my setup lately, I think I’ve finally found my home on Linux. For decades I’ve distrohopped each year and never was really happy with it all, but Fedora Atomic has changed that.

Some things I can do with Fedora Atomic that I cannot do with other Linux distros:

  • I can rebase to Bazzite for gaming performance when I feel like having a long gaming session.

  • I can rebase to Secureblue when I think I will not be gaming and would prefer a more secure linux setup.

  • I can update my system and not have to worry about special instructions, its extremely stable. Many times in the past, running a small ma-and-pa distro with most things pre-configed for performance would end with it breaking after a couple of major updates. This isn’t true for configs like Bazzite and Secureblue, they are remarkably stable across many major updates due to how rpm-ostree functions.

  • Distrobox and Flatpak are more than enough at this stage for most programs and they help you avoid making too many alterations to the base image, greatly speeding up the swaps between major images.

The kicker? Your user configs and home files are never changed when you ‘image hop’. It always feels like you just installed a fresh distro whenever you upgrade, and the performance benefits are noticeable. You don’t have to tinker and do the same changes over and over, its all handled for you by rpm-ostree.

10/10 this is the future of Linux. I hope for a future where I can rebase entire Linux distros while maintaining my configs with one simple command, but for now, Fedora Atomic is fantastic.

The downsides:

  • There is one major downside, and its that all of your system files are read-only. Personally, I’ve found a dozen ways to get around this, it requires thinking inside the Distrobox. It is a notable issue for many people, though. This means you cannot make specific tweaks without making a whole new image for yourself. Though in practice, I have found the ecosystem has grown a lot. Other people have already made the best tweaks available for you with only a few simple commands.

  • Rpm-ostree also is slow to update because its essentially building a whole git tree to make sure your updates never break and are as stable as possible. You also have to reboot each time you alter it, which can be annoying, but if you stick to flatpaks and distroboxes, this issue is mitigated significantly.

    • HayadSont@discuss.online
      2·
      3 hours ago

      thanks, that’s comprehensive

      Thanks fam for the appreciation!

      I recommend it at least :-)

      I totally get it and I actually appreciate your efforts. Which shouldn’t be surprising as I favor anything ‘atomic’ over the traditional model. Heck, were it not for Fedora Atomic, I would probably have daily-driven openSUSE Aeon instead.

      Uhmm…, my apologies for sidestepping to a topic I would rather not… But here goes nothing…

      Perhaps you might have noticed the discussion that has been going on elsewhere in this thread😅. And thus…, you might have become aware that an LLM was used (by me) for wording/phrasing/punctuation the earlier ‘info-dump’. Note that the content is still mine. I just wasn’t able to commit to put out a decent writing myself. Instead, I speech-to-texted my input. Asked the LLM to make it legible. After which we had a bit of back-and-forth until we arrived at the final result.

      Anyhow, now that you’re aware of the context, I would like to ask you the following: What would you have preferred?

      • (Either) That I didn’t do any of that and thus not comment at all.
      • (Or, rather) Our current situation in which I did whatever I did.