I use Casa"OS". It’s fine, but nothing groundbreaking. Cockpit for example can do pretty much the same, and for Docker containers, I nowadays mostly use docker compose.

But hey, it helped me a quite a bit in the beginning, and it’s cool. Pretty basic, but enough for most people, mainly beginners.

Then how do you explain the continued success of Mint?

Because Mint’s philosophy is to make a friendly, simple and usable system for everyone.

That may be for people who came from Windows before, or those who like their OS to be a bit more conservative, meaning no flashy stuff, boring, and just working. Just like Windows was “in the good ol’ days”.

This makes it accessible and usable by everyone, including Linux sysadmins who come home after work and don’t want to deal with annoying computers and fixing things.

Everything on Mint feels high quality, functional and cohesive.

ElementaryOS on the other hand feels like a cheap MacOS clone, but nothing works. Those who want Mac, buy a Mac.

Mint/ Cinnamon on the other hand is similar to Windows (XP, 7, etc.), but not a copycat. It’s familiar enough to be intuitive for Windows users, but much enough it’s own thing.

Mint’s main focus is to get a uncomplicated, and usable system, while Elementary’s focus is to just do what Apple does. … Well, did. 15 years ago. They totally forgot how much work maintaining a distro and a desktop with a whole app suite is, and just stopped working on it.

While Gnome and KDE (and other WMs/ DEs) got magnitudes better in just one year (e.g. Plasma 6), Pantheon (and Elementary) just stagnated the last 5 years or so.

They don’t even offer/ work on Wayland yet, or other new things.

Either they’ll stop working on Elementary, and focus only on Pantheon, so it can live on on other distros, or it will just continue dying like it does currently.

Logseq and Obsidian are only similar on the first look, but very different usage wise. Both are very open with a plugin system, and you can modify them to turn them into one eachother.

So, if you want only FOSS, then Logseq is the only choices you have.

But Obsidian is, even though it’s proprietary, very sane. Open plug-in system, active community, great devs who don’t have much against FOSS, and more.

Obsidian

• More similar to a classic note taking app, like OneNote, but with a lot of features. Hierarchical structure, and more of an “essay” style, where you store a lot of text in one page.
• Page linking is only done when you think it makes sense
• Has been a bit longer around than Logseq, feels more polished
• Great sync and mobile app, which support plugins from what I’ve heard

Logseq

• Non-linear outliner. Every page is on the same level, but within a text passage, the indentation matters (parent-child-relationship)
• You create a LOT of more pages. Most of my pages are empty. They are mainly there for linking topics. I rarely create pages manually.
• The journal is where you write most stuff. You then link each block to a page.
• Logseq a bit “special”. May not be for everyone. I for example am a bit of a disorganised thinker, who mentally links a lot of knowledge and throws concepts around all the time. Logseq is my second nature, because it’s more flexible. My GF on the other hand is more structured, and prefers something like Apple Notes, or, if she would care about note taking, something like Obsidian.
• The mobile app isn’t great. It’s fine when I’m not at home, but the desktop version is the “proper” one, and mobile/ iPad a second class citizen.
• Sync is only experimental for now. It will soon be officially supported (hopefully) and self hostable, but it worked fine for me.

I don’t see any problems with that. Even I (and probably most others here), who are FOSS advocates, think Obsidian’s model is fine.

The devs surely get why FOSS is important, and try their best to match the pros of open source. They even stated that if the company goes bankrupt or they stop developing the app, they’ll open source it.

One major thing they do absolutely right is how the notes get stored. On other note taking apps, it’s a proprietary database, often “in the cloud”, where your notes get hold hostage. Here, they’re just Markdown files, and the whole thing is pretty open, encouraging a strong community.

It’s similar to Valve/ Steam. Proprietary, but liked by most Linux people.

I will give the font a try!

I’m not dyslexic, but I think legibility is super important and underrated on most distros. This one looks both aesthetic and very readable.

Do you know if it is already in the Fedora repos? If not, how can I install it?

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I never had an IT background and also “just tried” Linux a few years ago.
Now, I’m still not an Linux expert, but relatively proficient with it.

I tried reading “How Linux works” (free e-book), but didn’t have a great time with it.

It’s just too detailed for someone who just wants to use Linux. It might be an absolutely great resource if you plan to work in IT, but other than that, just it’s too much wasted time.

What helped me a lot was to use Linux as an OS for my homeserver.

You don’t need anything fancy for it. Just use an old spare laptop or something similar you have laying around, or buy an used small form factor PC, like those Mini-PCs many businesses use. Those often cost less than 50 bucks and would otherwise land on the trash.

Then, install your server OS of choice. The most popular one is just plain ol’ Debian, and it’s what I used. It’s a great choice!

Servers run without a display or GUI (DE/ WM). You set it up once, and then connect to it remotely via SSH.
With that, you can either install a web interface like CasaOS or Cockpit, or just use the CLI for everything.

For the start, you can choose just Nextcloud AIO and call it a day. It comes with all things needed for a functioning webserver. But, things said, the learning experience ends here pretty quickly. It’s made to be easy and painless.

If you want to learn more, then consider setting up the stuff for yourself. It’s also really not hard (coming from someone who doesn’t IT stuff professionally!), but takes a bit more time, because you have a lot of choices.

For that, you might consider checking out c/Selfhosted and awesome-selfhosted on GitHub.
Theres a lot of really cool things you can discover!

The main reason I recommend that, and not just “Try LFS, Arch, Void, Gentoo, or whatever” is because I find it pretty much useless. Sure, you learn how it works, but for what price?
When you set up your own homelab, then you have actual useful things running, you also learn a lot, and maybe you can add it to your CV when applying for jobs. I for example work in the chemistry sector, where IT stuff like this is pretty useless on the first glance, but I often got invited for a job interview exactly because of that. It’s just a nice skill to have!

For checking out great CLI tools, check out the according video from TheLinuxExperiment or other YouTube/ PeerTube videos.

Try to learn the basic commands, like cd, ls or cat, then look up for more advanced/ alternative tools, like tree (instead of ls), bat (instead of cat), and so on, and then try to learn shell scripting.

I really like using fish instead of bash, because it’s a very friendly and interactive shell ;)

I hope that my comment was helpful! :)

Each to their own. Linux is, in my opinion, about choice. If one prefers everything to be ultra minimalist, native and lightweight, then that’s fine.

I personally just find to be Linux’ most overlooked strength is containerization. It’s one of the main reasons why most servers run Linux, because of things like Docker. On the desktop, containers are way underutilized, but that’s now slowly changing with things like Flatpak or Distrobox.

A distrobox container is technically more bloated than a native install, sure, that’s correct.

But, in my opinion, it’s like saying “Drawers and closets are bloat for my apartment. I throw everything on the floor.” Yeah, now you have less things in your room, but it looks like shit, you can’t find anything and you fall over your tubberware that’s mixed with your underwear and shampoo.

Having everything collected in a container only costs me a few hundred MBs and a small amount of RAM if needed. But, literally every PC has more than 50 GB hard drive space and 8 GB RAM. If your system slows down because of one container, then your PC is the problem, not distrobox.

That absolutely doesn’t mean we should stop optimizing software of efficiency. But it can help us to spend our time on more important stuff, like fixing bugs or adding new cool features.

I really love Flatpak because of that. Sure, it has some drawbacks, but as soon as more devs support Flatpak officially, and iron out some issues we currently have, like misconfigured permissions, they’re (imo) the best package format. Why should a distro maintainer have to apply every software change to their package format? That’s needlessly duplicated work.

Just a small (or maybe big?) tip for you 🙂

If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date

There’s a tool called Distrobox.
You can install it (via CLI I think?), and then manage it the easiest graphically way via BoxBuddy (available in your Software Center), or just the terminal if you prefer it.

With it, you can screw all those “Doesn’t work on my distro” moments.

You’re on Linux Mint? No problems, here’s the AUR for you!

✨✨✨ BONUS: Your OS won’t break anymore randomly due to some AUR incompatibility, because everything is containerized! ✨✨✨

Even if you run Arch, use it to install AUR stuff. Or Debian/ Ubuntu, add PPAs only via Distrobox.

It’s absolutely no virtual machine. It basically only creates a small, lightweight container with all dependencies, but it runs on your host. Similar to Flatpaks.

You can also export the software, and then it’s just like you would have installed it natively!
Your distro choice doesn’t matter anymore. You now can run any software written only for Suse, an abandoned Debian version 10 years ago, Arch, Fedora, Void, whatever. It’s all the same.

I hope that was helpful :)

If you want to use this laptop with Linux and not spend time fixing hardware compatibility issues, then I definitely would not recommend this laptop. Definitely get a Dell XPS for a Linux laptop that Just Works.

Have you tried the -framework images from uBlue?

Maybe Logseq? It also has a whiteboard function for drawing diagrams and stuff.
The last time I tried it, it wasn’t Logseqs’ flag ship feature for sure, but as an addition to an already great note taking software, it was good.

Then you can always rollback in case you don’t have a working image.

I had to do that once. On a non-atomic install, this would have meant a completely broken system. In my case, this was one reboot away and it worked again.

And in case you don’t like the direction of your image project going, you can also always rebase to another one in less than 5 minutes, download time and reboot included.

uBlue for example starts with a very basic Fedora Silverblue image, which you can fork easily yourself. I have zero experience in coding or other stuff, and even I managed to get my own custom image working.

There are already a couple of people around who started with Aurora, Secureblue or Bazzite, but then found them too opinionated, and went back to Vanilla Kinoite for example.
It’s extremely simple to switch out the base OS to something almost completely different.

And, you don’t loose any customisability. You can still do everything you want, take a look at Bazzite or Secureblue. Completely different kernel, additional modifications and packages, and much much more. Feels completely different than Vanilla Kinoite for example.

Image based distros are only complicated if you come from traditional distros, because they’re different.

If you come from Windows or another OS, then having “The whole OS is one thing” instead of “A huge collection of packages and directories” makes everything simpler to understand, because you don’t mess with anything except /home/. You don’t have to care about anything else.

And if you want to do something more fancy, like using a CLI tool, then having to enter a Distrobox container isn’t complicated.

For casual use, like gaming, browsing or image editing, everything is just as usual. Nobody, except us Linux nerds, actually cares about the underlying system. Casual users just want the OS to be a tool for their programs they use, and for that, it’s ideal, because it just works and doesn’t bork itself.

A small form factor PC. Think of a Mac Mini. Small, often not-high-performance, low-powered PCs that are often used in business environments.

I use one as my home server.

I don’t even mean performance in terms of computing power.

RPIs are, imo, not meant as a server. It might (and will) work fine, but one of the main problems I have is the power supply. As soon as I send a more advanced print job to my RPI, it crashes. Even though I have the official power cord.

If it works for you - fine! I don’t want to tell badly about them. They are great.

It’s just that they are very inflexible.

I don’t see any reason to use a Raspi instead of an used thin client for selfhosting.
They use about the same energy, but the Mini-PC has x86, which has better software support, has more ports, and runs more stable.

I have a RPI for my 3D-printer (Octoprint), and I will soon replace it with a “proper” PC, because it always crashes.

Raspberry Pis are good for very small appliances, but for anything more, they suck imo

While your blogpost isn’t completely right, it’s also not completely wrong.

You can absolutely customize image based distros, just as much as package manager based ones. You just need to do it from upstream, to modify the image itself, not from bottom-up like usually.

uBlue is the best example. There are already hundreds of available customized images around, including for Hyprland, Deepin, and much more.
That’s why immutable is often considered the wrong term for it. Image based, or atomic, is way better fitting.

One of the biggest pros, apart from the lack of maintenance needed (updating, etc.) is the reproducibility.
It’s very similar to Android, where every phone is the same.
Therefore, every bug is the same too, which is why the devs can roll out patches that fix everyone’s install at once.
Also, every update is basically a “reinstall lite”, so no package drift occours.
This makes them way less buggy in my experience.

I used the normal Fedora KDE spin for example, and after a few months there often came weird bugs that only affected my install.
Since the time I use Atomic, none of those problems came back.

Even if you decide to utilize BTRFS-snapper, which you suggested, the underlying system drifts apart from the original install.

Also, instead of Kubuntu, I would recommend the Fedora KDE spin or just Debian with KDE, if you really want to use something traditional.
I just don’t see any reason to not run Kinoite compared to a non-atomic distro, and it will only get better in the future.

Just FYI: While Arch isn’t “For experienced users only”, it still might require some more work after your install.

It usually comes pretty minimal by default, and then you might wonder why printing doesn’t work out of the box for example.

It also makes the inexperienced user very easy to bork the system, and then you have to fix it.
I often hear from other users, that sometimes, this just happens out of the blue too.

If Arch works perfectly for you, then congratulations! Keep using it.
But if you notice, that you have to fight against the OS too often, consider a different distro that is supposed to just work.

One of those might be Bazzite (if you game) or Aurora. Both are almost the same, but Bazzite is more for gaming, while Aurora is more for general, non-gaming use. But you can use them interchangeably.
They belong to the uBlue project, which is a customized Fedora Atomic.
They are already set up for you with everything you want and need, are zero-maintenence and basically indestructible.

So, if you’re done with Arch, consider them.

Thing is, uCore has some very neat things I want, and FIOT doesn’t provide me such a great OOTB experience compared to the uBlue variant.

I’m also not sure if I even should decide for Fedora Atomic as a server host OS.

I really love Atomic as desktop distro, because it is pretty close to upstream, while still being stable (as in how often things change).

For a desktop workstation, that’s great, because DEs for example get only better with each update, and I want to be as close to upstream as possible, without sacrificing reliability.
The two major releases each year cycle is great for that.

But for a server, even with the more stable kernel, I think that’s maybe too unstable? I think Debian is less maintenance, because it doesn’t change as often, and also doesn’t require rebooting as often.

What’s your experience with it?

How did you set up the intial system?
From what I’ve seen, FCOS needs an ignition file and has no Anaconda installer. I would like to set it up soon too, but it looked like a huge hazzle…