And that distro, or rather distro family is Fedora Atomic distros.
Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system, and you just can’t get that with other distros. Especially if you’re allowed to modify system files. Universal Blue is the only project I’d consider to be aligned with this idea.
- For the non programmer: Aurora
- For the developer: Blue Fin
- For the gamer: Bazzite
Users can install new apps via the Bazaar, or command line tools via homebrew. And that’s it.
If you want to mess around with other systems, you can use distro shelf or a spare computer. But if you’re a newbie, I wouldn’t even recommend Linux Mint anymore.
My daily distro is EndeavourOS btw.
The main problem is when following instructions for command line tools. They might figure out how to use dnf instead of apt, but the extra layers required for ostree are not very friendly. There are a ton of potential frustrations in this area, especially with GPU stuff or hobbyist hardware like Arduino where kernel stuff is needed in userland. At least as of nearly 3 years ago, the documentation in this area sucks. I was on Silverblue for a few years and managed to get through the frustrations due to intermediate experience level. I found toolbox useless compared to distrobox. But using this with something like Arduino was annoying at best. The needed dependencies expected by whatever stuff I wanted to install was usually a big mystery with near useless error failure messages and names of packages and libraries totally unrelated to the package naming in DNF. When updating the base OS, stuff built in these containers is totally useless because I could not update the containers to the new OS image. Playing around with Flash Forth on a microcontroller was even worse. I ended up layering a bunch of stuff on the host because the containers were just not working. When I got an Nvidia machine, I went to Fedora Workstation and have had far fewer issues and frustrations. SB wasn’t bad, but it is a pain to use these if you need kernel level access. Just my $0.02. I was actually on SB for ~2-3 years.
I agree that those issues can be frustrating (I came from arch and now use bazzite, so I do have some cli headaches sometimes), but most newbies are not going to even open a terminal imho. For them it is unmatched in terms of stability and ease-of-use.
I do agree with you that anyone who tinkers with electronics or software should start with something else though.
Yes, that is exactly my point. If you can afford to tinker and like to do so, this post isn’t about you. For cmd tools Universal Blue recommends you use Brew instead of modifying the OS tree.
I agree 100%. It’s amazing how stable these distros are.
Universal Blue’s solution to this was to implement Home Brew so a user doesn’t need to modify the OS Tree. But in my opinion, someone who is needing this will likely not be the absolute newbie I’m targeting here.