Installing Linux Doesn't Need to Change. The Experience Does.
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We really gonna pretend the name caller is as bad as the guy with the opinion that "critics are useless and should just learn how to do the thing the critique"? Cuz that's a classic shitty opinion
Not pretending anything. Saying they're both acting silly. Eos.
Have a nice day
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Just saying, not my experience. I have used linux for over 25 years and nontechnical users in my family have also for almost 20 years. By in large it has worked just fine.
The big issue is Linux is not the OS that is supplied when people go to the store and buy something (well except for Android and Chromebooks which are Linux and are popular). It is also not the system or have the apps their friends use. It also does not have the huge supply, support, and word of mouth ecosystem. Buying hardware especially addons is confusing. Getting support is hard unless you have friends that use. Buying Linux preinstalled often costs more. Change too is hard and there has to be some driver and for most people there is not.
I've been a "heavy" user(/admin) of Linux in the server space for about 12 years now, but only recently through a new employment opportunity have I become a daily Linux desktop user. Last weekend - slowly coming to the realization that Linux can really satisfy all my personal needs (including gaming that supports DLL injection) - I thought I'd like to see how feasible this would now be for the kind of end-user that I encounter as customers and friends, family members etc.
Having chosen CachyOS for myself a lot of my needs are now met brilliantly by the AUR, but of course I don't see this being a realistic proposal for an end-user. Flatpaks on the other hand I am now (and previously through my Steam Deck) encountering as a super straightforward way of covering a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of apps people may need, and having them remain usable across system upgrades and such. I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but with Flathub I feel that there's not just everything there that probably covers 95% of non-tech-savvy people's needs, there's even stuff in there that you can't get anywhere else with a simple install button. Like a youtube-dl UI for example.
Anyways this isn't even the story I'm trying to tell, sorry for the tangent. So I thought if I'm ever going to recommend any distro to someone it's gonna have to be an immutable one, but based on what I just said I'd say any distribution (immutable or not) is going to be dead in the water if it doesn't come with Flatpak support out of the box. And so the choices in terms of popular ones (according to ChatGPT) were VanillaOS and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. (Personally I use KDE now but I think the most approachable DE is always going to be Gnome hands down unless you're talking outdated hardware.)
So I set up VanillaOS in a VM, latest ISO from their website, went through the installer, all went fine until the reboot where I was basically just met by a lengthy splash screen and then some GTK error saying it failed to launch or whatever and then the screen just remains black indefinitely. Obviously this isn't supposed to happen, it's probably something to do with my virtualized setup, but if there's any chance of this happening on the physical machine of a person in need of a digital revolution in their life then this is certainly not what I'm going to recommend to them.
Next up, Fedora Silverblue. Went through the installer, the Fedora one is already a great starting point in terms of simplicity. Rebooted into a working Desktop Environment, so already winning on that front. I had one minor problem there where the last step of the Initial Setup process would just hang if I wanted it to enable Third party sources straightaway. If I left that off I could finish and finally get to my Desktop. Then I would open the Gnome "Software" app and it would basically ask the same thing in a more convoluted manner but basically that means there's a second "chance" to enable third party sources without having to find something in a settings menu. It's a little more fussy than if the checkbox had just worked on the Initial Setup but I guess I could see many people work through this if I told them "don't check that last checkbox and then check it in the Software app".
It's weird that both avenues I tried came up with problems that seem way too on the nose to be overlooked. Or who knows what factored into those problems, but really they shouldn't even be within the realm of possibility. For a setup process to yield a black screen or hang itself if the wrong checkbox is clicked are the kind of things that (imho) are going to define when the "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme will stop being a meme. If you can give me an immutable Linux with Flatpak support out of the box which can be booted on a SecureBoot enabled computer and which will reliably install to a working Desktop then we're talking. For now, my recommendation is Fedora Silverblue. Slap that onto a USB-Stick and you have a somewhat attainable Linux installer that mere mortals can make use of.
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You're both being silly. Ones a gatekeeper, ones a name caller
Want to know what's wrong with Linux? The community.
Nobody is gatekeeping. One of us is asserting that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The features being requested do not come for free. Someone has to sink the time into doing the work.
So, in an argument between people doing the work and people insisting someone else do the work for them, but it must be to the specifications of the armchair quarterbacks... well... I've got bad news about the things the non-paying non-coders want.
You can either pay money or pay time, but nobody cares about the freeloaders demanding things without offering any kind of compensation.
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Nobody is gatekeeping. One of us is asserting that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The features being requested do not come for free. Someone has to sink the time into doing the work.
So, in an argument between people doing the work and people insisting someone else do the work for them, but it must be to the specifications of the armchair quarterbacks... well... I've got bad news about the things the non-paying non-coders want.
You can either pay money or pay time, but nobody cares about the freeloaders demanding things without offering any kind of compensation.
" the day I start caring about what non-contributers think .."
Be sure not to wear your actual gate keeping opinion on Your sleeve if you want to deny them .
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By that logic I should demand to get payed for testing your "free" software in real environment
Not testing, using.
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My concern is we are solving a wrong problem from the beginning.
GNU/Linux is an OS designed by hackers for hackers(at least in my age). The target users should be admin, not end users like grandma. That's why Linux desktop is never mainstream despite our community put so much effort on the user experience (but the effort has not wasted)
Before you yell at me, on the other hand, android (shipped with Linux kernel) has a great success because it's dummy proof design. Even a 2 years old can mess around tablets by his/her own. We can invent million theories, argue and hate each other all days. But there is only one fact. The fact is that mainstream users enjoy the fruit of open source is brought by Android from tablets. Unfortunately, tablets' gui toolkit is dominated by big corps.
When do we start to put focus on gui toolkit for tablets? We did try, but far away than enough. When do we able to admit new generation use tablets way more than desktop? Seeing the open source communities keep heading the wrong direction make me sad.
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I've tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.
PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren't being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn't work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can't even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn't matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn't work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.
In case it matters, my specs are:
Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core
Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM
32GB DDR4-3200 RAM
Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I've only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that's ~4-5 years old.Okay, so I'm assuming with Pop you used the nvidia driver edition which meant it loaded using that. It's possible that Ubuntu tried using nouveau and failed to work I guess but I think I need to know more. Tell me about how you are connected to your monitor. Display port or hdmi? Do you have a docking station?
Were both installs using Wayland, xorg or dont know?
It's interesting that Pop installed and showed everything but Ubuntus later version didn't because Pop is based on Ubuntu and theoretically has most of the same drivers. I've experienced it not working exactly the same before but yeah, that's odd.
Does your computer use secure boot and was it on at the time you tried installing Pop, and Ubuntu?
Was anything above the usb in the boot priority during the Ubuntu installation? If the screen was unresponsive and the device rebooted using Ctrl,Alt,Del then how do you know that was ubuntu?
Do you have a spare device such as a laptop around with an Ethernet port?
What other distros have you tried and have you ever used Linux Mint? It's my GOTO for anyone new to linux (including myself).
Sorry that's a lot of questions but I think more information could be very useful.
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I've been a "heavy" user(/admin) of Linux in the server space for about 12 years now, but only recently through a new employment opportunity have I become a daily Linux desktop user. Last weekend - slowly coming to the realization that Linux can really satisfy all my personal needs (including gaming that supports DLL injection) - I thought I'd like to see how feasible this would now be for the kind of end-user that I encounter as customers and friends, family members etc.
Having chosen CachyOS for myself a lot of my needs are now met brilliantly by the AUR, but of course I don't see this being a realistic proposal for an end-user. Flatpaks on the other hand I am now (and previously through my Steam Deck) encountering as a super straightforward way of covering a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of apps people may need, and having them remain usable across system upgrades and such. I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but with Flathub I feel that there's not just everything there that probably covers 95% of non-tech-savvy people's needs, there's even stuff in there that you can't get anywhere else with a simple install button. Like a youtube-dl UI for example.
Anyways this isn't even the story I'm trying to tell, sorry for the tangent. So I thought if I'm ever going to recommend any distro to someone it's gonna have to be an immutable one, but based on what I just said I'd say any distribution (immutable or not) is going to be dead in the water if it doesn't come with Flatpak support out of the box. And so the choices in terms of popular ones (according to ChatGPT) were VanillaOS and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. (Personally I use KDE now but I think the most approachable DE is always going to be Gnome hands down unless you're talking outdated hardware.)
So I set up VanillaOS in a VM, latest ISO from their website, went through the installer, all went fine until the reboot where I was basically just met by a lengthy splash screen and then some GTK error saying it failed to launch or whatever and then the screen just remains black indefinitely. Obviously this isn't supposed to happen, it's probably something to do with my virtualized setup, but if there's any chance of this happening on the physical machine of a person in need of a digital revolution in their life then this is certainly not what I'm going to recommend to them.
Next up, Fedora Silverblue. Went through the installer, the Fedora one is already a great starting point in terms of simplicity. Rebooted into a working Desktop Environment, so already winning on that front. I had one minor problem there where the last step of the Initial Setup process would just hang if I wanted it to enable Third party sources straightaway. If I left that off I could finish and finally get to my Desktop. Then I would open the Gnome "Software" app and it would basically ask the same thing in a more convoluted manner but basically that means there's a second "chance" to enable third party sources without having to find something in a settings menu. It's a little more fussy than if the checkbox had just worked on the Initial Setup but I guess I could see many people work through this if I told them "don't check that last checkbox and then check it in the Software app".
It's weird that both avenues I tried came up with problems that seem way too on the nose to be overlooked. Or who knows what factored into those problems, but really they shouldn't even be within the realm of possibility. For a setup process to yield a black screen or hang itself if the wrong checkbox is clicked are the kind of things that (imho) are going to define when the "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme will stop being a meme. If you can give me an immutable Linux with Flatpak support out of the box which can be booted on a SecureBoot enabled computer and which will reliably install to a working Desktop then we're talking. For now, my recommendation is Fedora Silverblue. Slap that onto a USB-Stick and you have a somewhat attainable Linux installer that mere mortals can make use of.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Keep in mind you choose basically uncommon niche distributions. Go to distrowatch and choose one of the top 5 or so and use the distro repos and security updates. No flatpack is not needed for a well supported distro. That is especially true for one of the common Debian based distros.
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The fact that Linux still sucks for regular users after all this time is infuriating. What the hell have people even been working on all this time??
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You're both being silly. Ones a gatekeeper, ones a name caller
Want to know what's wrong with Linux? The community.
Yeah, you don't pay for software, you pay for support that won't insult you. Seeking support for FOSS stuff is like running a gauntlet of people who insist you're too stupid to use it.
If we want normies to use FOSS, the community needs to stop saying normies don't deserve FOSS.
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The fact that Linux still sucks for regular users after all this time is infuriating. What the hell have people even been working on all this time??
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeaaahh, but does it though?
I've put loads of regular users on Linux and on average they have less issues than they had with windows
That is ignoring the installation. Linux install is download iso, burn it on USB, boot computer with said USB, run the install program, go through the 5-6 pages which takes about 15 minutes, reboot and the machine is done.
Windows 11 install is downloading ISO, burn it on USB, boot computer with said USB and then the boot up immet fails with this vague error. Spend a good hour on Internet searches to find that it's some bios setting which is fine for Linux, but whatever. Make setting, reboot USB! Setup now crashes again on other gauge error. Spend another 4 hours on sraxhes only to find out that windows iso burning requires a special windows only burning program that will "fix" it and is totally not done on purpose to sabotage Linux users, but fine, were only 5 hours in and still have to start so boot up a VM in Linux, find that usb burner somewhere, download and install that, then download the iso again, burn it, dump it again in the machine and presto, er have an installer, yay!
Go through the pages, and more pages and more crap and install this sponsored content and watch ads and now you need an account at Microsoft and more pages and do you love me? Please let me know that you love me, more feedback because I'm Microsoft and I need feedback and now do you want these games that you hate, and you must install office you will love it even though you'd rather commit sepuku, and a fucking hour of clicking a thousand times later, windows is finally installed ..?
Seriously, if I say that installing Linux was ten times easier than windows, it would be the understatement of the year.
In it's general use, nobody will run into weird shit like they do on windows and to top it off, you got no issues with viruses, no ads nor spyware in the operating system itself, and shit just works.
Yeah, Linux has bugs, just like windows, but the experience is ten times better, I'll die happily and proud on that hill
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" the day I start caring about what non-contributers think .."
Be sure not to wear your actual gate keeping opinion on Your sleeve if you want to deny them .
It's always interesting to see how people react to being told to put in their own effort instead of demanding the effort of others.
You have access to the code bases. You have access to the contributing rules. You can submit your patches to the same repos everyone else puts their code in. What exactly is being denied to you?
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Okay, so I'm assuming with Pop you used the nvidia driver edition which meant it loaded using that. It's possible that Ubuntu tried using nouveau and failed to work I guess but I think I need to know more. Tell me about how you are connected to your monitor. Display port or hdmi? Do you have a docking station?
Were both installs using Wayland, xorg or dont know?
It's interesting that Pop installed and showed everything but Ubuntus later version didn't because Pop is based on Ubuntu and theoretically has most of the same drivers. I've experienced it not working exactly the same before but yeah, that's odd.
Does your computer use secure boot and was it on at the time you tried installing Pop, and Ubuntu?
Was anything above the usb in the boot priority during the Ubuntu installation? If the screen was unresponsive and the device rebooted using Ctrl,Alt,Del then how do you know that was ubuntu?
Do you have a spare device such as a laptop around with an Ethernet port?
What other distros have you tried and have you ever used Linux Mint? It's my GOTO for anyone new to linux (including myself).
Sorry that's a lot of questions but I think more information could be very useful.
Probably re:Pop nvidia driver edition.
Monitor: HDMI cable straight into the #1 HDMI port on my GPU. Probably have a DP cable around here somewhere but haven't felt like fucking with it since it worked fine on an HDMI cable on Pop. It's a standard desktop setup, not a laptop with a docking station or anything.
Wayland/xorg: no clue, it never asked and I never saw even the first pixel of graphical anything.
Yeah I thought so too re:Pop/Ubuntu, part of the reason I tried Ubuntu is because it was similar but I hoped it would have more stable drivers or the like. shrug
Secure boot: I don't remember (and can't reboot to check bios) - I think I remember having to disable it when I installed Pop, but that was several months ago and my memory is shit.
Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.
Spare laptop: nope. Closest I have is an old headless NAS box that's running an old version of RedHat I think?, but also it's been in my closet for ~5 years because I don't really have anywhere to set it up. So mostly no.
Distros; I mean a lot of years ago i messed a lot with RedHat and before that Slackware, but nothing on this hardware. I have not tried Mint, and I've heard good things about it, but I mostly wanted to go with a main-line distro like ubuntu because a lot of the forum posts and such I found talking about how to fix random things seemed to be for ubuntu so it seemed like it'd be easier to get help on.
And no problem, I'm happy to answer if it means I can make this work.
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I think it should be encouraged for non technical users to share their insights regarding UI/UX. People who are skilled in building applications often don’t have great skills in that area anyway. Actual UI/UX specialists are even harder to come by it seems.
The issue with this video is that it doesn’t bring in a ton of new insight. Issues regarding the variety of package management solutions are well know for example, and some distros are already solving this by having system packages and flatpaks managed by the same installer.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Correct. There are actual efforts going on to resolve those issues. Which begs the question, why post vague exhortations for people to "do something" about this, rather than focusing the efforts in places where it will make a difference?
This isn't a post saying "hey, come to this project and pitch in." This post is just bitching into the ether and then some folks getting butthurt when the pointless performative nonsense is called out for what it is.
Posts like this one happen on a near-daily basis all across FOSS mailing lists. It's trivial to find numerous, often young, often inexperienced people who think their idea is the one that "fixes everything". These people reason that everyone should fall over one another to put effort into their magical idea once they see the obviousness and correctness of the idea. Clearly, it's simply incorrect to find fault in an obviously perfect idea such as this one.
It's just so weird that literally none of the people with these amazing ideas are the ones doing a "git init" and getting started on the work of actually implementing their amazing ideas. Bizarre how so many spectacular, world-changing ideas need to be worked on by literally anyone BUT their champion. What a horrible world we must live in filled with nasty, evil people who simply won't volunteer their personal time when we should feel so blessed with this holy relic of an idea.
This narrative is so childish that the only response it deserves is the one echoed by nearly the entire FOSS community, "Patches welcome!"
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Yeaaahh, but does it though?
I've put loads of regular users on Linux and on average they have less issues than they had with windows
That is ignoring the installation. Linux install is download iso, burn it on USB, boot computer with said USB, run the install program, go through the 5-6 pages which takes about 15 minutes, reboot and the machine is done.
Windows 11 install is downloading ISO, burn it on USB, boot computer with said USB and then the boot up immet fails with this vague error. Spend a good hour on Internet searches to find that it's some bios setting which is fine for Linux, but whatever. Make setting, reboot USB! Setup now crashes again on other gauge error. Spend another 4 hours on sraxhes only to find out that windows iso burning requires a special windows only burning program that will "fix" it and is totally not done on purpose to sabotage Linux users, but fine, were only 5 hours in and still have to start so boot up a VM in Linux, find that usb burner somewhere, download and install that, then download the iso again, burn it, dump it again in the machine and presto, er have an installer, yay!
Go through the pages, and more pages and more crap and install this sponsored content and watch ads and now you need an account at Microsoft and more pages and do you love me? Please let me know that you love me, more feedback because I'm Microsoft and I need feedback and now do you want these games that you hate, and you must install office you will love it even though you'd rather commit sepuku, and a fucking hour of clicking a thousand times later, windows is finally installed ..?
Seriously, if I say that installing Linux was ten times easier than windows, it would be the understatement of the year.
In it's general use, nobody will run into weird shit like they do on windows and to top it off, you got no issues with viruses, no ads nor spyware in the operating system itself, and shit just works.
Yeah, Linux has bugs, just like windows, but the experience is ten times better, I'll die happily and proud on that hill
wrote last edited by [email protected]"shit just works"
I'm sorry but you're fucking high if you think shit just works on linux. Every problem is a rabbit hole of 3 new problems with 3 more new problems.I am by no means saying windows is any good, or any better necessarily. But this "Linux works great and is easy to use" is a load of shit and I'm sick of hearing it.
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Probably re:Pop nvidia driver edition.
Monitor: HDMI cable straight into the #1 HDMI port on my GPU. Probably have a DP cable around here somewhere but haven't felt like fucking with it since it worked fine on an HDMI cable on Pop. It's a standard desktop setup, not a laptop with a docking station or anything.
Wayland/xorg: no clue, it never asked and I never saw even the first pixel of graphical anything.
Yeah I thought so too re:Pop/Ubuntu, part of the reason I tried Ubuntu is because it was similar but I hoped it would have more stable drivers or the like. shrug
Secure boot: I don't remember (and can't reboot to check bios) - I think I remember having to disable it when I installed Pop, but that was several months ago and my memory is shit.
Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.
Spare laptop: nope. Closest I have is an old headless NAS box that's running an old version of RedHat I think?, but also it's been in my closet for ~5 years because I don't really have anywhere to set it up. So mostly no.
Distros; I mean a lot of years ago i messed a lot with RedHat and before that Slackware, but nothing on this hardware. I have not tried Mint, and I've heard good things about it, but I mostly wanted to go with a main-line distro like ubuntu because a lot of the forum posts and such I found talking about how to fix random things seemed to be for ubuntu so it seemed like it'd be easier to get help on.
And no problem, I'm happy to answer if it means I can make this work.
Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.
So do you get a grub menu at all? Is there the Plymouth (green, grey and white text only) loading screen? What does booting look like? I need more detail here because I've had driver issues and this is sounding more like a boot issue. Would it be possible to remove other hard drives during a test installation then add them back afterwards? Totally understand work and life comes first and all but if you get the opportunity, I've got a hunch.
I'm thinking we need a matrix chat or something to send images and details on lol
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The fact that Linux still sucks for regular users after all this time is infuriating. What the hell have people even been working on all this time??
It doesn't though. It's just different and takes time to learn. Like if a PlayStation only user switched to Xbox or a Mac user switching to windows. It's different. In my experience Mac isn't "user friendly" because it does shit different. I took some time to learn it. Now it is
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Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.
So do you get a grub menu at all? Is there the Plymouth (green, grey and white text only) loading screen? What does booting look like? I need more detail here because I've had driver issues and this is sounding more like a boot issue. Would it be possible to remove other hard drives during a test installation then add them back afterwards? Totally understand work and life comes first and all but if you get the opportunity, I've got a hunch.
I'm thinking we need a matrix chat or something to send images and details on lol
I have to hit F11 to choose to boot the linux partition, at which point I get a grub menu. I don't recall anything that says Plymouth on it, and I normally don't get a text screen at all unless I boot into recovery mode, at which point I get the usual linux text-spam on boot.
Booting looks like:
POST, F11
Select Linux to boot from (it's listed as the 128GB SSD because that's where the MBR/etc is, but linux is on a 1TB NVMe SSD)
Get grub menu.
Select Ubuntu.
Wait a lot on a black screen.
Get a brief Ubuntu logo that lasts a couple seconds.
Black screen again for a few more seconds.
No signal.Remove other drives: no, that would be a significant pain in the ass. But also Pop worked installed on the same NVMe SSD with the same other drives in the system, so I'm pretty sure it's not a drive/BIOS-related boot issue.
I'd be happy to chat, though I have no idea what matrix even is. Feel free to DM (does lemmy even do DMs? I'm still kinda new) if you want to try to get something like that set up tho. I'm on discord if that helps?
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Not testing, using.
If I report bug it's testing
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Keep in mind you choose basically uncommon niche distributions. Go to distrowatch and choose one of the top 5 or so and use the distro repos and security updates. No flatpack is not needed for a well supported distro. That is especially true for one of the common Debian based distros.
Of course people can have different opinions on this, but the point for me is that I am of the firm belief that immutable is a must for people that just want their OS to work indefinitely without having to take care of that aspect. And once you got that covered, I feel that you need some sort of "App Store" app out of the box where you can get whatever people may need. Ubuntu has Snaps, which to my understanding is just a different take on what Flatpaks are accomplishing.
Currently the Top 5 of the past 6 months on Distrowatch are all mutable, 2 of them are Arch-based, one comes with Xfce. I have been a Mint user myself and again, of course this is a matter of opinion, but for me the ship of using Debian derivatives has sailed, which might also subconsciously be the reason why no Ubuntu-based immutable distro has made it into my experiments. (No disrespect to Canonical and what they have done for the community since 2004, my first ever hands-on with Linux was on their 04.10 release.)
Either way I just can't see myself recommending any of those Top 5 to people who just want to use a PC reliably. And if I'm going to be the one they turn to with their problems I don't want those to potentially be about system-level breakages. When filtering by the "Immutable" tag on Distrowatch it seems that they just bunch those spins into their main distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. I guess you can say VanillaOS is niche in comparison, but Fedora Silverblue is basically an immutable version of a well established distribution with Red Hat backing no less. And once it is set up like my pilot is now it works just fine. I guess the plan now is to keep that installation running and see how it behaves across updates/upgrades and such.
