i use the universal blue silverblue-main image because it's basically silverblue along with some packages included that I otherwise would have to manually layer in anyway (e.g., distrobox, freeworld-amd drivers from rpmfusion) and some quality-of-life improvements (some just recipes, automatic updates enabled)
I tried bluefin, but it was "too opinionated" and I didn't agree with a lot of its opinions. Same for bazzite.
i switched from pihole to adguard because adguard is bsd compatible and runs on my opnsense router. for linux, the main benefit of adguard is that it is a self-contained app-image. pihole is a bit of a mess of packages that it installs (if installing on pc rather than a pi) , rather than being part of a distribution's native ports. upgrading adguard is also trivial.
You know who else is a nonprofit? IKEA.
I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here's what I hated :
DOS -> slack ware Linux -> win 3 -> os/2 warp -> win 98 -> win XP -> osx (several years on Mac) -> win 10 -> Ubuntu 14, 16, 18, 20 -> fedora 34, 35, 36 ,37, 38 -> Debian 12 --> fedora silverblue 40.
I needed LaTeX, and in the early 1990s, the Dos version sucked, and Scientific Word on windows 3 was very expensive.
/Oh yeah I'm old
i like using bottles & steam flatpaks on debian because they use newer mesa in their containers. so the best of both worlds with stable debian but more updated gaming drivers
Debian: boring installer, bare-metal install completed in about 10 minutes
Almalinux: nice installer, bare-metal install completed in about 10 minutes
Opensuse: nice installer, bare-metal install completed in about an hour. WHYYYYYYYY?
DKMS isn't supported on Silverblue. Only Kmods. So there's your problem.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/troubleshooting/
Even if you can get it to work, running ZFS on fedora generally is an exercise in frustration because the kernels update to newer versions than what ZFS supports anyway.
that arrangement on debian has worked well for me.
Currently running debian with an amd GPU. Using the regular 6.1 kernel
With steam flatpak and bottles (for nonsteam windows games) everything is running just fine.
moneydance for household finance tracking
i like fedora a lot, but its updates got a little too far ahead for me. So i recently switched to debian 12, and with flatpaks and their more-current mesa components, everything is working on my desktop as well as it was before, especially games on steam (flatpak) and in bottles.
Ubuntu -> Fedora -> Debian stable (and lots of flatpaks) for my desktop. Ubuntu has only gotten worse with age, and I got tired of being on the leading edge and just want stuff to work (and I use ZFS so I don't want rapidly upgrading kernels). For my home server Ubuntu -> Centos -> Almalinux
whelp, EPEL package updates are on a slightly different time trajectory for release, so almalinux update goes oopsie fail. gotta wait a little longer for that 9.4 goodness.
Tomb Raider 2013 reboot, although today the windows version under proton actually performs significantly better than the linux version
gnome 4 is fine. i come from macs and chromebooks, so a minimalist desktop with an app dock is familiar. KDE, XFDE, etc are too windows-y for me.
Fair, but last time I tried them, the foss apps were awful. But that was several years ago so might be worth looking again
ublue built zfs as a kmod.
Bottles
This is The Way
why not use fedora's built-in openvpn client and just add the pia info? That should likely work. https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/linux-installing-openvpn-through-the-terminal
or built-in wireguard client? https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/alternative-setups-4/linux-manual-connection-scripts
Looks interesting. Thanks!
Use the universal blue silverblue-nvidia image to get silverblue with Nvidia built in
For both my home server and desktop I use XFS for root and ZFS (in some variety of raid or mirror) for /home and data storage. Any time I've tried btrfs for root (such as default fedora), inevitably it poops the bed. At this point, I stay far away from btrfs.
recently rebased from fedora to debian, and reinstalling apps through flathub was ridiculously easy because all the settings and data were preserved in /home. also flatpaks incorporate newer mesa than what comes with debian stable, so it's an easy way to stick with a stable distro but also be up-to-date in userspace.
Way back in the early 90s I needed to use LaTeX for university. The dos version was awful and couldn't handle large documents. So the options were (1) a nextcube for $$$$, (2) Nextstep 3.3 for PCs for $$$ (some faculty had this), or (3) linux. So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
You had to configure the kernel, which wasn't too hard since the autoconfig walked you through it. The hardest part was setting up X11, which required a lot of manual config, and if you screwed up the timings you could destroy a CRT monitor. OpenStep was an option, so there was a moderately friendly windowmanager available.
Learning Emacs was also fairly unpleasant, but that was the best option for editing TeX at the time.
Everything would work, until it suddenly would break. But nonetheless I was somehow able to get that thesis done.
Ugh, modern linux is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better