WFH

I moved my Fedora SSD from an Intel 8th gen laptop to an AMD Zen4 laptop with 0 issue and 0 config. So… you’re probably fine.

I dunno. The Deck is/was sold at a slight loss in the hopes it would drive Steam sales.

Any one of the uBlue projects is perfect for this use case.

KDE: https://getaurora.dev/
Gnome: https://projectbluefin.io/
Gaming: https://bazzite.gg/

Install and setup once, run forever. Immutable so impossible to break for a non-tech user, no package upgrades fuck-ups because updates are atomic and don’t touch the currently running system, are done in the background and are completely invisible for the user, great hardware support, based on Fedora. Regular users can only install Flatpaks through the App Store.

The only “maintenance” needed is a weekly reboot to move to the latest OS image.

As a personal feedback, I moved my gadget enthusiast but tech illiterate father on Bluefin. He can ruin a Mac in less than a few months. He can generate undocumented bugs on iOS by his mere presence. He hasn’t touched the terminal in his life. But somehow, Bluefin is still running perfectly after a year and a half. That’s how robust it is.

As a side note, passwords are extremely useful for basic security, and a password less life is extremely dangerous. The fact that you need to input a password tells you that you’re doing something that requires extra care and attention.

If you’re lucky to have a fingerprint reader that supports Linux (extremely rare unfortunately), you can get away with typing your password once at login and using your fingerprint for everything else.

This. Migrating my father to Bluefin was absolutely eventless. Except the 8 hours of fighting over passwords. Because I’m supposed to know all his passwords, apparently.

Honestly, Microsoft is one of the most active participants in the shitty fascist dystopian surveillance shitshow in the us right now. It’s not that it “might not be better”, they are literally one of the worst.

Open source doesn’t work on trust, it works on scrutiny. Which is much easier to do when everything is open and therefore auditable. The threat model is very different, and the mitigation process is much faster since thousands of companies, including the biggest ones, need a secure Linux to run all their servers.

Open source software security issues comme mainly from :

• plain old bugs like everything else
• supply chain attacks (Example), which are actually very difficult to pull off since they tend to actually fail because of said scrutiny

What open source software won’t do because doing so would immediately kill a project:

• deliberate backdoors “for law enforcement” like most commercial platforms
• invasive telemetry/spyware
• Microsoft Recall that literally records and stores indefinitely absolutely every single interaction you have with your computer
• basically everything that’s deliberately harmful to privacy and/or security
• enshittification to maximize profit since there is basically no financial incentive and no venture capitalist behind distros

Any one of the uBlue projects is perfect for this use case.

KDE: https://getaurora.dev/
Gnome: https://projectbluefin.io/
Gaming: https://bazzite.gg/

Install and setup once, run forever. Immutable so impossible to break for a tech illiterate user, no package upgrades fuck-ups because updates are atomic and don’t touch the currently running system, are done in the background and are completely invisible for the user, great hardware support, based on Fedora. Users can only install Flatpaks through the App Store.

The only “maintenance” needed is a weekly reboot to move to the latest OS image.

As a personal feedback, I moved my gadget enthusiast but tech illiterate father on Bluefin. He can ruin a Mac in less than a few months. He can generate undocumented bugs on iOS by his mere presence. But somehow, Bluefin is still running perfectly after a year. That’s how robust it is.

Hello fellow late 90’s/early 00’s Mandrake enjoyer!

This is perfectly normal.

It also works with a Gaussian: (Noob) haha Fedora go brrr -> (angry advanced) nooo you must use Arch/Nix/Gentoo/Slackware -> (Linus Torvalds) haha Fedora go brrr

I have a 16, not a 13, but:

• it does have a supported fingerprint reader (at least on Fedora)
• spec it without RAM and SSD and buy them elsewhere. You can save several hundred [currency unit]s.
• the trackpad is glass and is quite good for a PC. Definitely not current-gen MacBook Pro-level.
• The speakers are meh. I’d say ok-tier for a PC, nowhere near a MacBook Pro either.

Framework laptops are expensive, but you buy repairability and upgradability. A lot of parts have already been improved in the 5(?) years the FW13 has been around.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: it starts with hardware.

It’s sad to say but a flawless Linux experience out of the box often comes from picking the right hardware first. Chose vendors who actively support Linux. AMD/Intel CPUs, APUs and/or GPUs. Intel WiFi card. Everything else should work ootb except most fingerprint sensors. Avoid laptops with dGPUs. Avoid nVidia. Hardware support comes from hardware vendors, the days of janky community drivers have been over for almost 2 decades. When it’s time for you to replace your hardware, do your homework first and/or buy from companies who sell Linux machines (Framework, Tuxedo, Slimbook, Starlabs, System76, some Dells, some Lenovos, etc). You can still buy from random companies but there won’t be any guarantees.

Then, the choice of distro in kinda important but not that much. In my 20+ years of actively using and working with Linux, both in the desktop and server space, I’ve always found Ubuntu and its derivatives kind of janky. I’m a lifelong Debian user, but my best experience on modern hardware have been Fedora on my main laptop and its atomic derivative Bazzite on my gaming rig. Bazzite also comes with a nVidia-specific image for those who can’t/wont replace their GPU.

Nowadays to limit interactions between system and user-facing applications, I tend to install most things from Flathub. It might not help with hardware issues, but it helps with stability.

There are a lot of QoL improvements on uBlue projects that make them much more usable as daily drivers, like hardware accelerated codecs from rpmfusion, nvidia drivers for those who need them or actually useful preinstalled software. Plus some minor improvements on defaults.

You’ve never heard of atomic/immutable distros? You’re part of the lucky 10,000 ;)

Bluefin, Aurora and their much more popular sister Bazzite are part of the universalBlue project: a delivery pipeline that lets anyone build their own, maintenance free atomic distro.

All uBlue projects are 100% based on Fedora Silverblue, itself an atomic distro based on Fedora. Which means that uBlue projects get automatic weekly upgrades just like Silverblue.

For people not familiar with Linux, and people who don’t want to spend any time maintaining their OS (HTPC, gaming rig etc), it’s amazing.

uBlue Bluefin or Aurora. Tested and approved. I moved my dad on Bluefin one year ago, no issues, it just works for his use case (90% of the time in a browser, light photo editing in Krita, some text editing). No maintenance, no updates, no actual knowledge needed as a daily user, just a single reboot once a week to boot the freshest system image.

And more importantly, it keeps on working despite his talent for fucking up every single piece of software he lays his hands on.

https://projectbluefin.io/

https://getaurora.dev/en

A multi-billion dollars marketing budget, anti-competitive practices and confidential agreements, blacklisting hardware vendors if they dare proposing an alternative, and of course a legal department the size of a small city to sue all competition out of existence.

Oh wait that’s Microsoft/Google/Apple/Meta/Amazon.

Funnily enough, I feel the opposite. Manjaro never worked reliably for me, but Fedora works great for my use case. Is it perfect? Fuck if I know. But it’s a good, no-nonsense, extremely low maintenance, super reliable distro that I use daily with zero issues.

Also, they pioneered the atomic distro concept that has amazing use cases, and some fantastic projects are based on this technology. My gaming PC runs Bazzite for a zero-maintenance, immediate gaming experience. My dads laptop runs Bluefin and he hasn’t broken it yet, and he’s capable of breaking every single OS.