Hah any time, man! Your work and YT vids are what really got me hooked me on Silverblue and the cloud native workflow! I’ll never look at computing the same way again lol.

Hah nice, I’d never heard of this one but there’s been plenty of times I’ve wanted to make a quick loop and didn’t want to fuss with it in ffmpeg directly. Will definitely check it out!

I still haven’t taken any of the uBlue images for a spin, but I sincerely appreciate what they’re doing and Jorge has been the perfect champion for the project.

I like to use upstream as much as possible. Partly to minimize breakage and complexity, but also for the increased security and overall focus of resources on a given project. That said, I have no doubt they’re awesome builds and have helped win a lot of folks over to this way of computing!

I totally get it as I’m a tinkerer too, but these days I spend most of that energy on webdev, house projects, thrifting/restoring stuff, etc. If only there was more time in a day lol.

There’s plenty of freedom to tweak local themes with atomic distros, as your home dir itself is entirely mutable and can be changed to your liking.

As to why Fedora/Arch… I love Arch and have used it daily for almost 20 years. I was an Arch dev once upon a time (Judd/Aaron era), and I designed the logo and web branding in use today. The project means a lot to me.

The inherent benefits of atomic systems caught my attention a couple years ago, and Fedora’s implementation won me over.

My hope is that Arch eventually (and officially) adopts a similar approach as these image-based systems become mainstream, at which point I’ll happily be the first in line for testing!

Fedora Silverblue (atomic GNOME) and Kinoite (atomic KDE) have been solid for both work and gaming. System maintenance is largely seamless and automatic once configured. I still use Arch daily, but only in the terminal (distrobox and containers).

Going AMD is so worth it too, I have zero regrets swapping my RTX 2080s for RX 6800 XTs. Secure boot, Wayland, no fuss updates. Couldn’t be happier.

You mentioned needing customization…not sure what you’re hoping for there, but the atomic distros allow for plenty of userspace tweaks. It’s the system-level stuff, like boot and greeter themes, that require a bit more work to implement. My time is too precious to fuss about that stuff these days.

There is no one-size-fits-all, but for fits most, you’re looking at KDE’s Konsole or GNOME’s new Terminal (formerly Ptyxis). Everything else is going to be niche, with special use cases. What are your specific needs?

I do this as well and for the most part it’s been fine. It’s handy to have options and, even for apps that do run under Windows, it’s often less hassle to just fire up the VM.

From a societal point of view, that’s a pretty sad read. I recently created a mastodon account–I’m not entirely sure why but I always wanted to give it a try–and this is exactly the kind of thing that has kept me from posting anything yet. It’s kind of just shouting into a void and not knowing what kind of response will come back (if any, given the platform).

At least with platforms like Lemmy, there is a clearly defined topic of discussion, and generally with like-minded contributors.

Fair points. I’ve only ever taken Mint for a quick spin and that was a decade ago. I just see it constantly recommended as one of the most user-friendly distros, thus the maybe recommendation.

Personally, I’m all in on Fedora Atomic for my hosts and (mostly) Arch in my containers.

I would maybe add Linux Mint to that list, but otherwise you’re spot on. Fedora and Ubuntu are the easiest and most robust systems for novice computer users.

Obviously, lightweight is open to some interpretation but Silverblue can be made very lightweight by simply uninstalling the default flatpaks. You’ll be left with a very basic GNOME shell and greeter, without any of the common GNOME extras. From there you could easily install your own window manager, greeter, and whatever apps you need.

For all its faults (and there are many), Huawei continually features some of best phone cameras available worldwide.

If all else fails, you can always spin up a Windows VM. I generally keep one around for tasks like this (or complex Excel workbooks).

If you’ve no prior experience with Linux, I’d say just try using it. For the average computer user, the overall experience will be very similar to Windows or Mac.

Go easy on yourself, and don’t try to do/learn everything all at once. Just use the system like you would any other. Once you’re comfortable with the overall experience, you can then tackle more complex stuff if/when you feel the need.

Edit: Just wanted to add that Fedora, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu are all solid choices for beginners.