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.

Because others already suggested Arch/ EndeavourOS, I’ll be suggesting something else: Bazzite.

It’s part of the image based (“immutable”) Fedora series and is basically Fedora Kinoite, with all drivers and codecs already set up for you, self managing, with many gaming tweaks included.

It’s rock solid and basically unbreakable, while also being extremely modern and updated. On Arch, even if it doesn’t break, you always get the newest stuff, which might not be as polished. On Fedora, it matures a few months, while still being very modern.

The main target group is “For Linux users who don’t want to use Linux”, meaning, it runs all your favourite stuff (KDE, etc.) without having to care for anything. It even updates itself automatically in the background without any interference.

If you prefer something with less “bloat” (a lot of optional tools and software to choose from, but nothing mandatory), then check out Aurora, which is basically the same, but without gaming stuff.

For more information, check out universal-blue.org

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.

Just use Flatpaks for 95% you do graphically, and for CLI stuff or software that isn’t available as Flatpak, I would recommend you to create an Arch Distrobox container (already set up IIRC) and use that. You can even install stuff from the AUR and export it, so it works just like it is supposed to.

Maybe, another consideration might be to not run Linux on Windows in some way, but the other way around.

Linux offers great virtualization, maybe you can use QEMU with KVM and GPU passthrough, and then run Windows inside this box.

I find Linux more powerful and less annoying to use day to day, and having those annoyances inside a small virtualized container I can just shut down is more peaceful.

WSL can be restricting, since Linux can’t access anything, and I think getting “the real and proper thing” might be better.

And dual booting, by having both Windows and Linux on the same drive, is something I would advise against. Windows doesn’t play nice with others and often “accidentally” breaks the bootloader and hard drive permissions, leading only to trouble. If you dual boot, install them on a separate drive and select the booting drive manually in the BIOS.

Also, why do you want to run Ubuntu specifically? Did you also look up for alternatives, like Fedora or Debian?

Dual booting Pros: a full-fledged Linux OS Cons: Harder to install and to mantain.

Also, sometimes Windows being an ass and “accidentally” breaking the bootloader.

I advice anyone to have just one OS per drive installed. Keep Windows and Linux separate if possible, or some Windows update may break GRUB.

The SMART didn’t help. It showed full health and no errors.

I had something similar when my drive started to fail.

At first, it was annoying, because the cursor froze all the time, just like yours, then programs started to do the same, then they started to crash without reason, and in the end, even my unbreakable OS (Fedora Atomic) broke randomy and incoherently.

What did I learn? Don’t cheap out on drives, and keep enough backups.

Thanks for explaining!

The only issues I had were due to fractional scaling (blurry apps, especially Electron based ones; and windows opening or moving to weird edges, where I can’t move them anymore).

But those were already a few months or a year ago, and since I switched from Gnome to KDE 6, I have zero issues, neither on my laptop (integrated on CPU), nor on my desktop with an AMD GPU.

And even over a year, almost two, ago, Wayland has been very smooth for me. I used Gnome for most of the time, which has always been very solid with Wayland. KDE has been a bit more janky in the past, but nowadays, Wayland feels way smoother and polished than X11 for me.

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.

That’s not what OP was asking for though.

Why not? In my comment I explained exactly what benefits it would have in this case with a Nvidia GPU. I think it makes sense to at least mention the option.

OP tried Bazzite and wasn’t the biggest fan of it, but not because it’s image based, no, just because it uses the same Nvidia driver as upstream Fedora.

They could also have said that they really liked it, who knows?

And I don’t understand why the Linux user community on Lemmy pushes immutable distros so hard.

Because they’re awesome? They’re extremely low maintenance, just work (for me), are very robust, offer a lot of choice, and much much more.

I think they’re very underrated and should be used much more. Sure, some people just don’t like them, but some people would, and those should know this option exists.

I personally think X11 shouldn’t be used anymore. Fedora dropped official support for it recently iirc and it will soon be deprecated, so it might be even worse in the future.

Wayland works perfectly fine under Gnome from what I’ve heard, and with Plasma, it should be working great too.

You could maybe try Bazzite or Aurora/Bluefin.

They are all Fedora Atomic, the “immutable” Fedora variant, and offer baked in Nvidia support.

The cool thing is:

1. If the driver/ Wayland breaks on your install, then it will break on thousands of others simultaneously, and the devs can fix it very very quickly, because every installation is identical.
2. If it breaks, you can roll back in seconds and keep using the image that still worked yesterday. And in the meantime, the developers are already working on a fix, which takes just hours or a day max.
3. You don’t have to install and update anything yourself. Just do your computer stuff and stop worrying.
4. There’s also a GTS (or whatever it’s called) variant around, which is the last major version of Fedora. You won’t get the newest stuff and will be half a year behind in terms of features, but then there won’t be any surprises. I believe the bluefin:gts isn’t around yet, but will come with the next major release.

You can maybe post something on local marketplaces. Something like Kleinanzeigen (Germany), Facebook Marketplace (US I think) or something similar. Or local groups.

There are a lot of hobbyists who have a printer that stands still for 99% of the time, who can print it for cheap.

Or, as someone else already has suggested, your local library.

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?

If the software you have to run is specifically designed for one distro (e.g. something that’s only in the AUR, or written for Debian) you can use Distrobox.

This creates a small, lightweight container that allows you to run any software from all distros on your host.

I, for example, use Fedora Atomic, and I mostly use an Arch container that’s fully customized for me, including having the AUR enabled.

If you liked Kinoite, then you can still consider it and run your stuff via Distrobox

Thanks for the notice! It’s now changed in the title.

I’m no native speaker and thought it was a synonym to “From time to time, when you feel the need to”.

Oh yeah! Definitely!

Tumbleweed is one of the best Plasma experiences you can get and not as widely known as it should be.