Linux

which distro and why do you prefer it over others?

Personally, I'm very fond of atomic^[1]^ distros. What they bring onto the table in terms of stability and "It just works."^[2]^ can't be understated^[3]^. I've been running Fedora Silverblue^[4]^ for the last one and a half years and it has been excellent barring some smaller issues^[5]^. While on the other hand, the distros^[6]^ I've experienced in the mean time through dual-booting happened to be a mess and I eventually couldn't continue to use them as they accumulated issues all over the place.

So far, it should be pretty clear why I prefer atomic distros over traditional ones. However, why do I favor Fedora Silverblue over the other atomic distros? Well, I try to be very security-conscious. And, unsurprisingly, this has influence on my choice. In this case; Fedora is the only one (together with openSUSE) that properly supports SELinux. While AppArmor is also excellent, it's not ideal for the container workflow atomic distros are known for; which is probs one of the reasons why openSUSE has only recently started supporting SELinux while they've been supporting AppArmor for a long time. Furthermore, while both Fedora's and openSUSE^[7]^'s offerings are excellent. Fedora has been working on theirs considerably longer and therefore their atomic distros are more mature. Thus, I ended up with Fedora. Silverblue, however, wasn't actually initially preferred over Kinoite. I started on Kinoite, which I was attracted to for how KDE Plasma was relatively similar to Windows^[8]^ and for how it allowed easy configuration out of the box. At the time, Kinoite wasn't that polished yet. So I had to rebase^[9]^ to Silverblue and the rest has been history.

There are actually atomic distros that don't heavily rely on the container workflow to do their bidding and thus don't necessitate the use of SELinux over AppArmor. Those distros would be NixOS and Guix. These are on my radar and I might even switch to either one of them eventually^[10]^. Heck, I've even installed the Nix package manager on Fedora Silverblue through Determinate Systems' Nix installer. But, to be honest, I'm most interested in Spectrum OS. Which I would define as the love child of NixOS and Qubes OS^[11]^.

1. Perhaps more commonly referred to as 'immutable'.
2. Built-in rollback capability. No system corruption due to power outage or anything. Automatic background upgrades.
3. Obviously, there's a lot more I like about them. I won't do a complete rundown, but the following is worth mentioning: (Some degree of) declarative system configuration. Reproducibility. Improved security.
4. To be more precise; at first just the stock image, but I've since rebased to uBlue's Silverblue image and more recently to my custom image using uBlue's 'template'.
5. As much as I like Fedora, their repos could be a lot better; both in terms of available packages and how up-to-date the packages are. Furthermore, though more GNOME's issue than Fedora's, extensions add IMO excellent functionality to the table. However, they sometimes behave very unpredictable in an otherwise very predictable environment. For example, enabling the blur my shell extension somehow forces me to log out right after I try to unlock my screen; probably caused by the gnome-shell crashing for some random reason.
6. Which would be EndeavourOS and Nobara.
7. Which would be openSUSE Aeon and openSUSE Kalpa.
8. Fedora Kinoite was indeed my first experience on Linux 😅.
9. Which actually felt like a magical experience for how easy and effective it is.
10. After their infamously steep learning curves have been conquered.
11. Best desktop OS in terms of security and privacy.