I really love these update posts, thank you a lot!

The PR/ communication from the KDE team is absolutely great, and I can’t wait til the new stuff will arrive on Fedora!

KDE is getting even better and better each update, it’s amazing! Thank you for your hard work! 💚

I can recommend you Debian, since it’s the “default” for many servers and has a lot of documentation and an extremely big userbase.

For web interfaces, I can recommend you, as you already mentioned, CasaOS and Cockpit.

I used CasaOS in the beginning and liked it, but nowadays, I mostly use Cockpit, where I have the feeling that it integrates the host system more, and allows me to do most of my maintenance (updating, etc.) quite easily.

CasaOS is more aesthetic imo, and allows you to install docker containers graphically, which is better for beginners.
I personally do my docker stuff mostly via CLI (docker compose file) nowadays, because I find it more straightforward, but the configuration CasaOS offers is easier to understand and has nice defaults

I replied to @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee and understood the question like “Is distrobox as secure as QubesOS?”, which I replied with “No”.

I’d say Fedora Atomic is definitely a bit more secure than other distros (e.g. Ubuntu, regular Fedora, etc.) for reasons you mentioned, but if you are a user that thinks that only Qubes offers the security you need, than there’s no alternative.

I can recommend you Secureblue tho as a good middle ground.
It’s Fedora Atomic, but hardened, a bit like GrapheneOS. Still viable for comfortable everyday use, but much more secure.

What’s your problem with the image based OS?

If there’s really anything you need, you can layer it or build your own image quite easily.

You don’t run a VM for everything with Bazzite, Distrobox is more like Flatpak or WSL in that regard.

It also isn’t much more secure, it’s just that everything is a bit more contained and comes with their own dependencies.

I recommend you doing so, but not as a security measure, more of so as a “keeping everything organised”-measure.

I like to keep my host OS clean and install everything containerised

You did everything right. Boot into the image that works, and then apply rpm-ostree rollback. This reverses the broken image and the working one, so you’ll boot into this one the next time you boot up until you change something in the order, e.g. by updating.

In the meantime, wait a day or so and then update again.

On what channel are you on? bazzite:latest or bazzite:stable?

Same. I still really love Gnome with my heart, but it just felt… inferior… compared to KDE 6.

Everything looked sharper, like if I had switched from 720p to 4k, I could access my hardware better (e.g. control the brightness of my monitor, etc.) and much more.

Thanks for your experience report!

Yeah man, Aurora (and uBlue in general) is fucking amazing. I’m using it on my laptop, and Bazzite on my gaming PC, which is pretty much almost the same tbh.

Sometimes, people here on Lemmy might think I’m getting paid by someone to make advertisements for uBlue, but it’s literally the best distro I tried so far.

It’s one of the few distros I would recommend for non-techy people, like my mum or friends.

The only thing I dislike about Aurora in particular is the release schedule of KDE.

Bluefin (Gnome) offers a gts variant, which offers older (and therefore more stable) packages, so you have half a year of extra testing.

Sadly, KDE doesn’t allow that, so it’s more of a rolling release, like you said. Because of that, my experience with Aurora has been a bit worse than Bluefin, but still better than most other distros with KDE imo.

EDIT: Dumbass me chose aurora:latest and not aurora:stable, no wonder I constantly got brand new packages. Ignore the last part.

The least annoying launcher for your web browser

I use and love both. KDE (Bazzite) on my desktop gaming PC, and Gnome (Bluefin) on my laptop for casual stuff, mostly YouTube.

KDE is a bit better for gaming since it has HDR and VRR and is the standard DE on the Steam Deck. I tried Gnome too just a few days ago, but it felt inferior in regards of gaming and content creation.

Gnome on the other hand has a place reserved on my laptop aswell as in my heart. Especially the ultra smooth and well thought out touch gestures and minimalist UI makes it perfect for laptop usage.

For me personally, I prefer Gnome over KDE. KDE is a bit more capable, but it overwhelms me sometimes. Gnome has a better concept and workflow for me. You either love or hate it, I do the first.

The problem with package based distros (everything non-immutable) is, that a distro is very complex.

Even if you manage to “swap out” the package repositories, you usually still have a lot of remaining stuff in the background and many things tweaked by the maintainers. It’s a huge mess.

In theory, you could absolutely do that, but to be honest, why bother? You already always should have a backup of all your personal data, so why not reinstall it cleanly?

Speaking of image based distros (“immutable”), the cool thing about most is that that you can easily swap out the underlying OS with just one command.

For example, you can always rebase from Fedora Silverblue to Kinoite to Bazzite to something with Hyprland and then back to vanilla Silverblue, without any traces.

So, for example, if the guy who makes your custom image on Github stops maintaining it, you can simply switch to something else in just seconds.

Maybe this is something relevant for you :)

Can 100% recommend.

The only difference between -deck and the classic one is the default environment it bolts into.

With -deck, you boot into the Steam big picture mode, and with the normal variant into normal KDE.

If you chose -deck, you can still enter desktop mode by clicking the power menu and then “Exit to desktop”.

For the beginning, I would recommend you to stick to a more popular Distro, like Mint, Fedora, Debian, and therelike.

Many niche distros, like CachyOS, are more tailored towards advanced users who know what they’re up to, or for special use cases, like TailsOS for extreme privacy (e.g. buying drugs, journalism, etc., it’s also commonly installed on an USB stick for portability and non-persistency).

With Fedora or Mint you get way more community support and resources in case something doesn’t work as expected for you, which it certainly will some time.

They’re also (mostly) identical performance wise.

For gaming, I would recommend you Bazzite, which gives you a first class gaming experience, and is extremely robust due to it being a completely new kind of distro. It also has the Nvidia-drivers already baked in if chosen, which makes it more reliable.

But regular Fedora (especially the KDE spin) or other common distros are perfectly fine too for that.

I’ve had this happen more often than I’d like to admit.

There were quite a few instances where I just couldn’t game in the evening after turning on my PC, mostly because of my power supply (outages while updating, unstable grid, damaged PSU and hard drive, etc.) and my ability to shoot myself in the foot in regards to my IT skills.

I imagined spending my friday evening differently than chrooting my install from another USB more often than I’d like to admit. At least Linux is repairable, good luck trying that with Windows…

Now, thankfully, I live in another house with a landlord that actually cares that I don’t get electrocuted in my shower, and I don’t have those problems anymore. I also don’t tinker as much with my OS anymore, at least not much.

Still, Fedora Atomic feels way more robust and less buggy than regular Fedora, especially KDE. And the QoL tweaks from uBlue are great too!

Probably Bluefin-DX.

The “DX” stands for developer experience. It’s a variant of uBlue/ Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) with a lot of added programming tools like Brew, Nix, IDEs, local LLMs, and more.

You can read more about it on the website.

There’s also Aurora, which is the same, but with KDE instead of Gnome.

The dx-images are meant to be a plug-and-play solution for developers. You just install it, share your container config to your project colleagues, and go. Don’t worry about not being able to work because of a bad update or some misalignments in your package manager broke your OS. Most stuff is containerised, and if your host breaks, you can just roll back, because the system is basically powered by git.

I’m no developer, but I use the regular variant for casual purposes (no specific tasks, mostly browser) on my laptop, and Bazzite (also very similar, but gaming focused) on my desktop, and both are wonderful! They’re the most boring distro/ OS I’ve used yet, and that’s great. They’re immutable/ image based and always work reliably.

I can really recommend them for a lot of people, from ranging from IT professionals to my mum.

I totally understand your wish, absolutely valid. From what I know Mint supports secure boot.

There aren’t many things that prevent that, but one might be the Nvidia driver. Were you able to boot into Mint and install it or similar things? Or did you just get greeted by the error message?

Maybe try downloading the image again and reflash it with another tool (e.g. Fedora Media Writer instead of Etcher) on another USB if you have one. It might be totally possible that your .iso did get corrupted in the process. And then do the whole process again.

I believe I had something similar a long time ago when I aborted the download and then resumed it, or when I pulled the USB too quickly without safely ejecting it beforehand.

I don’t use Mint, but secure boot is something that usually works by default on most distros.

Afaik, secure boot won’t increase the security as much as you think.

Did you try to reinstall it? From what you’ve written, you have some trouble with booting it. Maybe you selected some wrong partition schemes? The best one would be to select “Wipe whole drive and install”.

Did you disable secure boot, install it, and the enable it again? If yes, don’t. Boot your ISO from the USB with secure boot enabled and install it from there.

Btw, if you worry about security, then also consider also enabling full disk encryption, or at least the encryption of /home/

I wanted to add my own comment first, but yours covers it very well.

OP will be very happy with KDE and its’ app ecosystem.

About distro choice, it doesn’t matter very much.

My top recommendation would be Fedora Atomic KDE (Bazzite or Aurora), because it “just works”, has zero maintenence, will never break, and especially on Bazzite, gives you a first class gaming experience.

Other than Bazzite/ Aurora, I can of course recommend classic Fedora KDE, because of the sane defaults and both modern and stable release schedule.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed would be great if OP wants something that’s both bleeding edge and reliable, and EndeavourOS if they like Arch with very sane defaults, but more minimal than Tumbleweed.

I also made a very similar comment, but with uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin) instead.

They are still pretty vanilla, but include a big list of QoL stuff added in, like staged updates, Distrobox, a huge list gaming tweaks in Bazzite, and much more.

It’s basically stock Atomic made right!

I’ve used them for a year now, and they’re fantastic!

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic. Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.