When we got our first computer it was a Win 95 machine, with a copy of Encarta, Atlas. I don’t remember what word processor, but it wasn’t a full office suite.

It was cool. We did lots of typing and using ms paint.

Then we got a shareware cd. Hundreds of pretty useless games + 4 or 5 big ones like doom and transport tycoon, but it changed everything. Every day we’d try a new one. We’d mess around in DOS trying to get those ones working.

Then 3D Movie Maker - the full version. It all really started to come alive.

Then a microphone. Just messing around with sound recorder was like when we used to make “funny” tape recordings of ourselves, but without the hassle of tape.

These are the basic concepts of what I think made computers fun.

I guess the direction I’ll probably go shortly is the old AMD 2400g mini itx I have laying around. Put on an opensuse slowroll. We have a microphone handy. We have 900 games on our GOG account. I have an old intuos drawing tablet that might work. Add some of those education flatpaks - solariums and stuff. I think you can definitely do a modern version of what we had back in the 90s when computing was more than watching youtube.

Still good idea to check the feature matrix on their github though, I think depending on the device you could still need surface kernel.

Many surface devices don’t need a specialised kernel anymore anyway.

Surface Go 1-3 for example, everything is in Linux kernel 6.14+. And everything except the cameras is in since 5.17.

Hell yes. And every time I see it pop up, these points come up, usually a bunch of times. So people know this shit is trouble, and it’s still blowing up.

I assume it’s just that his channel mostly seems like advertisement for products. I like him enough, but I know what I’m getting if I watch one of his videos.

I’ve been using smb protocol for years. NFS is great when it works, but something about my network makes it unreliable or inconsistent between devices.

Smb has never caused me any problems.

Agreed. I’d say Ubuntu is generally fine except for defaulting to installing snaps (which are terrible, the worst package management).

Yes. This opinion piece pops up every couple of months and it’s always related to “this is how we get more Mac and Windows users”.

So go and use it then? I don’t care what you do.

CachyOS and Endeavour OS are the two common Arch derivatives - basically “Arch in easy mode”. They’re both very good.

Manjaro is another but it brings its own set of problems that I never have the time or patience to deal with.

I’m using CachyOS now since October. I’m enjoying it and haven’t come across any issues yet that weren’t easily fixed.

This is the first time in 5 years I haven’t been on opensuse.

Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.

I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.

I don’t know mate. I thought we were having a cool discussion about Linux shit but you seem really hostile now. Get lost, clown.

And also PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, those were the big recommendations as well. But we’re pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions I think we had in mind by going back that far too.

I’m not discussing quality of distro here, but people’s changing perception of Debian over the years. The way that people currently use/suggest/recommend distros has put Debian more in favour than say 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

It’s always been good depending on use case, but people currently are recommending it more for general use than has been typical before. And I think it is, as you said, that some of those past limiting factors are not a big problem anymore. I did suggest that in my first post.

Oh yeah, there’s a big difference now in distro conversations.

Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around “best distro for me”, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; “of you’re going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the source”.

But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. It’s strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.

Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about “bleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in between”

Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and it’s easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.

Now people will regularly say “use Debian, it’s solid and reliable” and not follow up with “you’ll have to deal with old packages though”

The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.

Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.

Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.

Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.

Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.

On the other hand:

Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see “I’ll give Slowroll a try.”

PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.

Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.

The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.

Everyone here thinks their shit tier 2018 laptop is made of gold or something.

Ublue will happily include media codecs, nvidia drivers, ootb hardware acceleration… the things you would likely do with a Fedora image - but Fedora can’t or won’t include by default due to strict guidelines on their project or legal concerns.

Side other niceties like ublue includes distrobox, which is commonly used in other immutable distros, but Fedora don’t include it.

It’s basically overcoming Fedora’s limitations as a starting point. And It’s not downstream, it’s more alongside Fedora, you’re essentially running Fedora with ublue’s optimisations plugged in. When Fedora’s updates come through, you’ve got them.

And here’s the mission statement https://universal-blue.org/mission.html

Only those first 4 are within the ublue project. The others are just part of Fedora, different variations of Fedora immutable distro.

A ublue can be rebased to the Fedora images. So you could go from having Aurora to having Kinoite for example.

That repository of images you linked to you can get from the project pages. Like the Bazzite page will say “are you on handheld?”, “do you need game mode?” “Do you have nvidia?” And then link you to the appropriate version from that repository.

There might be deprecated versions in there, for example I know they don’t maintain the Surface kernel version anymore.

Their website has a rundown of each, links to each projects page, and notes on what makes ublue different.

https://universal-blue.org/

But ignore all the “cloud native” talk. It’s got nothing to do with end user experience and I don’t know why they still feel the need to highlight it.