Besides the already mentioned Star Labs and System76, there's also Insurgo, Nitropad and NovaCustom.

As for an exhaustive list on the matter, unfortunately, I don't think something like that is out there. Though both Canoeboot (formerly known as Libreboot) and Dasharo do have their own respective lists.

The simple virtue of being able to genuinely express these words; "I don't know", "Sorry" and "Thank you" (or any derivative of these*).

“compile pretty much every command your distro has in exchange for a measly half a second faster boot times!”

I don't deny the existence of people with such motivations, but I'd argue the sheer amount of freedom that Gentoo allows is its defining feature. And for that, even though I don't use it on my main device, I'd argue it's actually one of the primary contenders for best distro.

Pop!_OS is definitely worth considering as it's one of the few distros that goes as far as providing a recovery partition and offers one of the best experiences for those with Nvidia GPUs. Furthermore, Pop!_OS' maintainers (read: System76) are actually financially incentivized to make their distro very polished and newbie-friendly as their distro is used on the hardware they sell.

On the flip side, Pop!_OS is currently in a major overhaul to replace GNOME with COSMIC; their own homebuilt Desktop Environment. As the Desktop Environment is arguably the most important contributor to how one experiences their Linux system, the eventual change might disrupt your workflow and you might even be too accustomed to GNOME to consider COSMIC at that point. The ongoing work on COSMIC has even meant that Pop!_OS has missed three major releases and are still clinging on their release from April 2022; thankfully it's based on Ubuntu's LTS (read: Long Term Support) release, so they aren't particularly in rush to get a new release out and can rely on Ubuntu for security updates.

Regardless, COSMIC's unsure future does leave a lot to be desired and does pose the question if perhaps other options should be considered more seriously instead.

Therefore, my personal recommendation would be either one of the following:

• If you just really like what you see from Pop!_OS, then just install its 22.04 release and you should be good until April 2027. As time goes on, you might be deprived from new developments and features; but at least updates etc will not be able to (potentially) corrupt/break your system in the meantime.
• Wait until April next year; when they're supposed to release a new version. If you like what you see and the update and the changes are well-received by the community, then consider installing that one instead. It should be supported for 5 years, which is plenty to not worry about your system in the mean time.
• Go look elsewhere. There are hundreds of actively maintained distros out there. While not all of them are worth considering, there are at least a dozen of them that are worthy contenders. In case you're interested to get the community's help in finding a distro, consider answering the following questions:
  • Do you use an Nvidia GPU?
  • How would you rate your tech savviness on other operating systems?
  • How eager are you to learn and/or invest time to use your Linux system?
  • Do you prefer to have up-to-date software at all times even if that means daily/weekly updates that might potentially break some functionality?
  • Security or convenience?
  • Opinionated or blank slate?

A shortlist of distros worth considering for a beginner (from easiest to hardest): Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian/Fedora/openSUSE and Arch.

Star Labs' take on the matter.

Furthermore, if one is sensitive regarding their cybersecurity, then one is likely to adhere to the zero trust security model and thus choose to simply not trust; which would include the closed source BIOS. coreboot, on the other hand, at least allows one to audit it themselves. As Linus Torvalds has been approached for implementing backdoors, it should surprise nobody that (some) of the vendors we buy our devices from have been as well and thus our BIOSes might not have been as safe as one would like to believe. Qubes OS, the most secure OS on desktop, shares the view that coreboot is preferred over closed source BIOSes due to reasons related to trust.

In general, consider setting up any kind of rollback functionality; this will enable you to get right back to action without any downtime when you're time-restricted. This can be achieved by configuring your system with (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper. Please bear in mind that it's likely that you have to come back to solve it eventually, though*. (Perhaps it's worth thinking about what can be done to ensure that you don't end up with a broken system in the first place. *cough* ~'immutable'~ ~distro~ *cough*)

If this seems too troublesome to setup, then consider using distros that have this properly setup from the get-go by default; like (in alphabetical order) Garuda Linux, Manjaro, Nobara, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa/Leap/Slowroll/Tumbleweed, siduction and SpiralLinux. Furthermore, so-called 'immutable' distros also have rollback functionality while not relying on aforementioned (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper; this applies to e.g. blendOS, Fedora Kinoite/Sericea/Silverblue, Guix, NixOS and Vanilla OS.

If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of choice, then you should probably consider the bold ones; not because I think they're necessarily better but:

• openSUSE's offerings are generally speaking very polished, therefore being highly suitable to replace Linux Mint or Ubuntu. It's its own thing though, therefore you might not be able to access packages that are exclusively found in Debian's/Ubuntu's repos (though Distrobox solves that trivially). Tumbleweed if you like rolling release, Slowroll if you prefer updates only once every 1-2 months and finally Leap if you lean more towards Stable/LTS releases.
• siduction for being based on Debian; but it's strictly on the Unstable(/Sid) branch.
• SpiralLinux for being based on Debian; this one -however- has proper support for switching branches.
• Vanilla OS for being based on Debian; this one is very ambitious. But, because it's an 'immutable' distro, it might require the biggest changes to your workflow.

nvidia drivers are absent

While any of the aforementioned distros do a decent job at 'supporting' Nvidia, perhaps you might be best off with uBlue's Nvidia images. As these are images relying on the same technology that Fedora's immutable distros do, rollback functionality and all the other good stuff we've come to love -like automatic upgrades in the background- are present as well. In case you're interested to know how these actually provide improved Nvidia support:

"We've slipstreamed the Nvidia drivers right onto the operating system image. Steps that once took place on your local laptop are now done in a continuous integration system in GitHub. Once they are complete, the system stamps out an image which then makes its way to your PC.

No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We've fully automated it so that if there's an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone.

But it's not just installation and configuration: We provide Nvidia driver versions 525, 520, and 470 for each of these. You can atomically switch between any of these, so if your driver worked perfectly on a certain day and you find a regression you just rebase to that image.

Or switch to another desktop entirely.

No other desktop Linux does this, and we're just getting started."

Source

Distrobox is directly inspired from Toolbx and was created because of limitations of Toolbx and how Toolbx' maintainers didn't want to implement some features at that moment in time.

Currently, Distrobox is almost a superset of Toolbx. Though, I've come to the understanding that Toolbx does better at some tasks.

If you would like to stick to just one of them, then Distrobox is probably still the better one and should be preferred. However, if its added functionality doesn't do it for you, then please feel free to continue using Toolbx.

Why is toolbox preinstalled and not distrobox?

Because Toolbx predates Distrobox and is developed by developers that are associated with Fedora and even specifically designed in hopes of solving some issues pertaining to Fedora's Atomic distros.

Wouldn't it be fun to have "a ready-to-game Arch Linux based OCI designed for use exclusively in distrobox"?

is there any reason why I should even care about the freedom of init system?

Freedom of choice! It's troublesome if distros and/or DEs rely so heavily on systemd to do their bidding. So much so, that some combinations of distro + DE don't allow any differentiation in init or make it very cumbersome and unwieldy at best. I'm not interested in making systemd a necessary part of Linux. Therefore other inits not only have to exist, but should be 'competitive' as well. Which, to be frank, is currently not the case.

Another concern is that systemd is by no means a minimalist approach. Which beyond bloat, also has security implications. More information can be found in this (infamous) guide by Madaidan; security researcher on multiple distros known for taking security and privacy very seriously like e.g. Kicksecure and Whonix. Interestingly, while Madaidan discourages the use of systemd in that guide, it's still heavily relied on in Kicksecure; one of the distros he works on. I think this is a perfect illustration of how systemd has become so good that even opponents can't deny its merits and continue to make use of it for the time being out of necessity.

Lots of great answers here already so I will only address a couple of things that haven't been mentioned:

Regarding Fedora Silverblue:

• Currently, Fedora Atomic Desktops are in a major shift to accept OCI container images for delivery of packages. This means that the built image becomes one compliant to OCI and that we boot into an OCI container as our system. As OCI images are relatively declarative (not to the extent that NixOS does (yet)), it becomes possible to have a set of config files (most importantly, the so-called Containerfile) in which your system is 'declared'/'configd'. In case you're interested into how this looks/works, consider taking a look at uBlue's startingpoint or if you're more interested in the scope of configuration into Bazzite and/or Bluefin.
• apx is available as a COPR on Fedora Atomic Desktops.
• Nix can be installed on Fedora Atomic Desktops using Determinate Systems' installer.

Regarding Vanilla OS:

• They're also moving to a model that's very close to where Fedora Atomic Desktops is heading towards. So, expect a similar way to config/'declare' your system.

What are your thoughts on the three four distros mentioned above?

It's a question of polish if you'd ask me. With Fedora Atomic Desktops and NixOS being advantageous due to being more established and better funded. I wouldn't write off Vanilla OS yet as they seem to know what they're doing. Though, I wouldn't keep my hopes up for blendOS as its main developer was unaware of which MAC was configured by default on blendOS (spoiler alert: none, at least at the time).

Furthermore, NixOS is literally its own thing and unfortunately infamous for its steep learning curve. If you can afford to learn and conquer NixOS, then NixOS should be the recommendation; unless (like me) you seek SELinux on your systems.

Between Fedora Atomic Desktops and Vanilla OS; Vanilla OS is still in its major rewrite/revamp. The alpha builds are there, but I wouldn't recommend using those on production machines. Fedora Atomic Desktops, on the other hand, has been going strong for a while now and the uBlue-team has even succeeded in making the OCI-stuff accessible for the general (Linux) public. So if you want to switch now and NixOS is/seems too hard; then Fedora Atomic Desktops it is. On that note, I recommend to check out the uBlue project.

Which ones are the most interesting, and for what reasons?

Honestly, all of them are really interesting, but NixOS does the most unique stuff; with only Guix doing something similar within the Linux landscape. To give you a taste of some of the wild stuff found on NixOS; there's the so-called Impermanence module which -to my knowledge- happens to be the closest thing to a usable stateless system we've got; period. Consider reading this excellent blog post in case you're interested to know what this entails.

Basically, you want to not disable kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone.

For a temporary solution that has to be redone after reboot, there is sysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1.

For a lasting solution, consider echo kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-enable-unpriv-userns.conf.

In either case you're foregoing security for the sake of convenience/functionality, so I understand why you would rather not act upon either of them.

I don't know what the solution is that would be analogous to installing bubblewrap-suid. Perhaps, it's worth exploring the projects found within the github page of Awesome Fedora Security for some pointers.

Not OP. But for me, atomic updates, reproducibility, (to some degree) declarative system configuration, increased security, built-in rollback functionality and their consequences; rock solid system even with relatively up to date packages, possibility to enable automatic updates in background without fearing breakage, (quasi) factory reset feature, setting up a new system in just a fraction of the time required otherwise are the primary reasons why I absolutely adore atomic^[1]^ distros.

1. I prefer referring to the so-called 'immutable' distros as atomic distros instead. It's more descriptive, because the distros aren't actually 'immutable' but instead they're atomic.

I don't understand how people break it.

It's probably related to installing packages through the AUR, even though it's known to be unsupported on Manjaro specifically due to their policy of holding back packages.

I'm saddened by how the once great Elementary OS has fallen from grace. I hope they will be able to bounce back to former glory and beyond, but I'm skeptical at best...

to use as a media centre and multiplayer gaming system in my living room

Based on this, you're basically looking for the 'game console experience on your couch'. If that's the case, honestly you shouldn't look beyond^[1]^ Bazzite.

If, instead, you actually wanted to play retro games primarily, then please let us know.

1. While ChimeraOS and HoloISO also offer the 'game console experience', they don't support Nvidia GPUs. So you would be on your own at best; which would be a horrible experience for a new user. If you feel particularly adventurous, then Jovian-NixOS is actually another option. But arguably less newbie-friendly compared to Bazzite.

You basically already know the drill; buy it from a Linux-first vendor that offers devices that you can afford. A list of vendors can be found here. Personally, I'm quite fond of NovaCustom and Star Labs. Fortunately, both have 'cheaper' offerings with their NJ50 Series and StarLite respectively.

I cannot wait to get home and try it out!

Please consider reporting back after you've tried it; I'd love to read your experiences.

Very interesting indeed! And thank you for raising awareness!

There's another similar project that's still WIP and that hasn't received a lot of development recently. Though, its maintainer does provide hardening scripts for Fedora's Atomic distros that are worth looking into. Hopefully, we might even expect a collaboration of sorts between these projects early next year 🤞.

We would love to help you! But please consider helping us by providing more information:

• Do you actually want to switch distros? Or just interested in what's out there?
• If Fedora 39 didn't satisfy you, then what exactly is bothering you?
• What is it that you seek from your distro? Being out of the way? Freedom? Polish? Blank slate? Security? Privacy? Ease-of-use? Up-to-date? Big repos? etc

Am I going off the deep end by considering Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite?

I started my Linux journey on Kinoite, which unfortunately had some issues at the time of installing; after which I rebased to Silverblue, I have since 'mained' Silverblue while experimenting with a couple of other distros through dual-boot or on spare devices. The first two weeks were really hard as I literally knew nothing about Linux. The fact that documentation is -generally speaking- lacking doesn't help either. But if I was able to surpass that initial barrier, then I'm sure you can too.

But, motivation is important! Why do you even consider an 'immutable' distro?

I don’t really understand what new I would need to learn

You'd have to replace sudo dnf install *package-name* with flatpak install *package-name*. If, however, the package is not available as a flatpak, then -following Fedora's initial guidelines- one should install it within a container through Toolbx(/Distrobox). After a container has been created (toolbox create *pick name for container*) and entered (toolbox enter *chosen name for container*), one simply behaves within the container as though how they would in a traditional distro. As a last resort -in case installing within a container is not possible, well supported or doesn't work as intended- one can layer it (rpm-ostree install *package-name*).

Furthermore, /usr can't be touched (at least not easily), except for /usr/local. And some features, like UKI, aren't supported yet.

or really what benefits it would have.

• Updates are atomic; it either happens or doesn't, there's no in-between state. Even a power outage or a random crash doesn't change that. This ensures your system isn't broken if something unfortunate befalls it.

• Additionally, the system (for the most part) is reproducible; I can rebuild my system from scratch (barring configs; unless your dotfiles management is sublime) and it is exactly the same as the one that has been running since the inception of Silverblue. Cruft, state, bitrot etc can finally be left behind..., but we're not their yet. There's still some amount of these present in Silverblue's current model. But we're embracing OCIs and Silverblue's primary contributors know what's up over at NixOS and (hopefully) are working to make Silverblue ever so slightly more stateless. Even if a lot of work is still required, it's infinitely better than the traditional model as it has gone from an uncountable amount of possible states to a countable amount. And the mathematicians under us know that such an improvement is infinitely times better. Another benefit of where we are currently with reproducibility would be that it allows us to combat bugs effectively.

• Security benefits due to more parts of the system being read-only. This is however (somewhat) offset due to lack of the aforementioned UKI support. Hopefully, the well-defined nature of an image-based distro will eventually make more robust system-integrity checks possible.

• Not necessarily exclusively granted through/by 'immutability', but system maintenance has been a joy. Most of the time, it just works anyways. But, if somehow something breaks, then I can easily rollback; either through the terminal if I was able to get inside. Or through the GRUB-menu if the 'broken' deployment doesn't allow me to get inside. Furthermore, you can even pin a confirmed working deployment through sudo ostree admin pin *number* to select the deployment to keep around for longer. I recommend everyone to keep around their first deployment after installing Silverblue, if used wisely it's one of the closest things to a factory reset we've got within the Linux space.

Arguably there's a lot more to talk about, but these are probably the primary benefits.

Their business-practices sure do leave a lot to desire, which actually does hurt their trustworthiness; arguably their most valuable asset as a privacy-first browser. Hmm..., good food for thought, thank you!

Use Firefox.

I mostly do already 😅, from OP: "at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser".

NixOS has been around since 2003, thus making it older than Ubuntu (2004). Even Silverblue has been out since more than 5 years (October 2018). Finally, we can't forget about Guix that had its first release over 10 years ago (January 2013).

What is a reliable yet affordable option to get started?

Unfortunately, good affordable hardware on which Linux is properly supported is hard to get by. I'm personally fond of vendors like (in alphabetical order) Framework, NovaCustom, Star Labs, System76, Tuxedo. But other vendors like ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo are known to sell devices that do a considerable job at supporting Linux; consider to check the compatibility/support for their devices through resources like linux-hardware.org.

Are my concerns based in reality or is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues?

Regarding video types; I don't think you should have any problems regarding those; on some distros it might not be supported by default, but that should be solvable with a single command. Relying on flatpaks^[1]^ instead is another viable solution and is enabled by default on a lot of distros. Moving on to word document templates; I suppose the suite of cloud-based services found in Microsoft 365 should work regardless. As for the question if the templates would work on LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE and the like; I simply don't know. On to familiarity of OS and using it for business purposes; most distros that are friendlier towards newer users have been setup with sane defaults. Therefore, I don't think there's a lot that could go wrong as long as you're interacting with a GUI. When interacting with a command-line interface, note that information found on the internet is often times outdated. Therefore, if you're hesitant or unsure; consider interacting with the community for some help. We're all in this together!

is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues?

You should be totally fine aside from some software that's known to not support Linux at all.

What else might I need to know to use Linux comfortably from the get go?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• To what degree are you interested to learn how it all works and to experience what Linux offers?
  • If you see it primarily as a means to an end, then pick a distro that does an excellent job at accommodating your workflow without requiring you to relearn more than necessary.
  • If instead, interest in Linux itself is the main driving force behind the switch, then please be mindful that the Linux rabbit hole is very real.

Is it going to take a lot of time and effort to get Linux running how I need it to?

Somewhat related to the previous question*. Like, there are distros out there that I can install for my grandfather and he wouldn't even notice the difference. But even some (relatively) mainstream-distros can be daunting for so-called power users of Windows. E.g. I would argue I was your average Windows-user; play games, browse the internet, email, write documents, video-editing, run software required for my studies etc. It took me about two weeks before I was 'comfortable' on Linux. And even then, some of the software I used for e.g. video-editing just didn't want to play nice^[2]^.

So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.

If you want freedom and control over your devices, there's simply no viable alternative.

1. Software management on Linux -at least on the surface- is closer to Android/iOS than to Windows. You should rarely (if at all) feel the need to find software through your browser. Instead, you should interact with so-called package managers. This can be achieved through either a command-line interface or a storefront with a GUI that behaves like those found on Android/iOS etc. Coming back to Flatpak; this is an (upcoming) universal (read: (mostly) distro-agnostic) package manager that tries to solve a lot of problems that traditional package managers have had. There's still a lot of ongoing work for it to achieve its design-goals to the fullest, but even in its current iteration it works excellent and therefore it's unsurprising to find it enabled by default on a significant chunk of the Linux landscape. Software that are packaged using this technology are referred to as flatpaks (or flatpak if singular).

2. In retrospect, this seems to be primarily rooted in the fact that my machine isn't that powerful in the first place. On Windows, it managed because it was better optimized for it. Unfortunately, on Linux, this was not the case.

One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.

This is true for the traditional model in which the package manager is the main differentiator between distros. Therefore Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE etc and their derivatives (which make up about 90% of the distros found on DistroWatch) are indeed mostly the same.

But the likes of Gentoo and NixOS etc don't quite fit the bill. Granted, a new user should only very rarely (if ever) start their Linux journeys on any of these advanced distros.

Thank you for reporting back! Much appreciated!

So it turns out, I cannot use my NVIDIA card using distrobox. I guess it only works with AMD?

Interesting. Unfortunately, I don't own an Nvidia device. Therefore, I can't tackle it myself. Distrobox should allow the use of Nvidia, but I'm unaware if this applies to the bazzite-arch container as well. The picture you shared and the link to its FAQ-page (found below) do suggest otherwise, unfortunately...

I was wondering if distrobox would somehow allow better performance

FWIW, I've always experienced better performance inside the bazzite-arch distrobox container, at least compared to Flatpak*.

I see that this image is used a lot on Steam Deck, which I also don’t understand why (as opposed to having everything native).

Because the distro image it's used in conjunction with, Bazzite, is Fedora-based, while Steam OS is based on Arch. Bazzite is Fedora-based in the first place, because Arch doesn't officially have any plans for 'immutable' distros yet. As for the remaining distros, only Fedora and NixOS (see Jovian-NixOS) have a sufficiently mature and suitable platform at this point in time.

maybe I am missing some graphical dependencies

This happens way more often than you might expect. Even the so-called 'toolbox' containers from Distrobox miss a lot of packages required to support software graphically. Consider running it inside a terminal and pay attention to error codes etc; those might/should help you resolve the issue. Sometimes it helps to explicitly use the -v or --verbose option to ensure that the program actually communicates what's happening.

Welcome on board!

You revealed in your previous post to be a gamer. Therefore, I'd like to focus on software that might help with that (in alpabetical order):

• Bazzite-Arch
• Bottles
• Conty
• Lutris^[1]^

For a one-stop-solution for all your problems related to package X not being available in the repos of distro Y; consider the more than excellent Distrobox.

1. You should probably start with this one as the others might be less intuitive to you at the moment. Furthermore, their use-cases and thus why one might prefer the others over Lutris in the first place might not be clear currently and not even be stuff you worry about in the first place.

I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues

This might be important; perhaps consider telling us about the issues you ran into.

I am an absolute beginner to linux

Honestly, you should be fine regardless. But it's undeniable that -due to Linux Mint's popularity amongst new users- you'll likely have an easier time finding solutions to problems you might encounter.

and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up)

Once again, either one of these should be able to suit your needs. You might have to relearn how you access your games, but that's true regardless of whichever distro you end up choosing.

Fedora is and will always be cutting leading edge.

Fixed that for you ;) .

Brave homophobic though

Its CEO; yes.

It is the best Chromium based browser, in a sense, unfortunately…

Agreed.

I’d definitely like to get some of the classic multiplayer games running on emulators as well.

Bazzite does allow easy install of EmuDeck and RetroDECK during first installation, which should cover most of your emulation needs. For completeness' sake; Batocera does exist. However, I'm not sure if it runs e.g. Steam games as good as Bazzite runs retro games.

Thanks for the correction!

I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.

Thank you for being thoughtful! I just wanted to add some nuance with my previous comment.

It's often used to describe a distro in which (at least some) parts of the system are read-only on runtime. Furthermore, features like atomicity (i.e. an upgrade either happens or doesn't; no in-between state), reproducibility^[1]^ and improved security against certain types of attacks are its associated benefits that can (mostly) only exist due to said 'immutability'. This allows higher degree of stability and (finally) rollback-functionality, which are functionalities that are often associated with 'immutability' but aren't inherently/necessarily tied to it; as other means to gain these do exist.

The reason why I've been careful with the term "immutable" (which literally is a fancy word for "unchanging"), is because the term doesn't quite apply to what the distros offer (most of these aren't actually unchanging in absolute sense) and because people tend to import associations that come from other ecosystems that have their own rules regarding immutability (like Android, SteamOS etc). A more fitting term would be atomic (which has been used to some degree by distros in the past). The name actually applies to all distros that are currently referred to as 'immutable', it's descriptive and is the actual differentiator between these and the so-called 'mutable' distros. Further differentiation can be had with descriptions like declarative, image-based, reproducible etc.

1. That is, two machines that have the exact same software installed should be identical even if one has been installed a few years ago, while the other has been freshly installed (besides content of home folder etc). So stuff like cruft, bitrot and (to a lesser degree) state are absent on so-called 'immutable' distros.

I don't know by heart if it's able to do your bidding, but perhaps it's worth checking out penguins-eggs. I guess the following would be its elevator pitch:

"penguins-eggs is a console tool, under continuous development, that allows you to remaster your system and redistribute it as live images on usb sticks or via PXE.

The default behavior is total removal of the system's data and users, but it is also possible to remaster the system including the data and accounts of present users, using flag --clone. It is also possible to keep the users and files present under an encrypted LUKS file within the same resulting iso file, flag --cryptedclone.

You can easily install the resulting live system with the calamares installer or the internal TUI krill installer."

Nix is definitely cool and I already have it installed on my system. Unfortunately, even Nix has trouble with keeping Brave up-to-date at all times. It's still on 1.59.120, while Brave has had three releases since. It took about 3 days after the release of version 1.59.120 for them to release it on their repos. As you can see, it leaves a lot to desire.

we use discord

Fortunately, Discord has (very recently) started to officially support Linux as a flatpak.

I disagree with most of the benefits you list

I'm curious to hear your objections.

chief among them “increased security”

Do you deny that specific protection to some attacks is provided through the chosen model of 'immutability' on at least one of the atomic distros?

not to mention half of them are already supported by traditional package managers

Hmm...,:

• atomicity; nope
• reproducibility =/= reproducible builds for some packages (if that's what you meant)
• declarative system configuration; ansible (and any other solution that I've witnessed being mentioned in such discussions) succeed (at best) at convergent system management, while e.g. NixOS does congruent system management by default. Consider taking a look at this page if you're interested in what these are and how they're different. (Spoiler alert) congruent is better and therefore more desirable.
• increased security; security is not limited to chosen model for 'immutability' if at all; as Qubes OS (read: most secure and private desktop OS) doesn't rely on it for its security. So I can understand where you're coming from, but I have yet to see any non-security focused distro that provides the elevated protection against particular attacks that some atomic distros offer by default.
• built-in rollback functionality; sure, this is not exclusive to atomic distros. Perhaps I should have done a better job at making clear that it isn't a feature provided necessarily by atomicity. But, the fact that I listed it at the very end, alludes that it isn't as exclusive and consequential as atomicity is. At this point, however, it has become almost synonymous with atomic distros, while the same can't be said about traditional distros.
• regarding the consequences; I'm unaware of any distro that does those out of the box (barring Pop!_OS with their factory reset). Though, I'd love to be educated on this.

I was genuinely curious so thanks for the rationale.

It has been my pleasure ☺️! I'm also genuinely curious to read your reply to this comment😉.

How so? I literally don't see it. My apologies if I come across as obnoxious, but I simply don't understand how I might have contradicted myself. I never explicitly mentioned Debian anyways, so why did you feel the need to mention that as somehow being related to a supposed contradiction.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Though, this shouldn't stop one to pick their fights and savor the wins. The defeatist mentality is our biggest enemy, we will not be victorious in the end if we don't resist.

Let's hope an excellent implementation of RISC-V with eye for open-source, processing power, efficiency and affordability comes out so that we're not limited to the expensive (but otherwise excellent) Talos II by Raptor Computing Systems.

Understandable! Please consider coming back to this at some point (also possible in private) as I'm genuinely curious to hear from you.