Hacker News Reader

Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, the Sway/Kinoite Atomic spin is so tempting for me as a regular Fedora user. Two weeks ago, a kernel update borked my laptop, and for some reason it deleted the older versions, so I was forced to live boot, chroot, and install a beta kernel. A few days ago, my desktop stopped booting - something to do with Nvidia drivers, and older kernels don't help. I don't have the time to try and fix it any time soon.

But, there was definitely pains with this kind of desktop when I tried it last time. Regular old software I want to install via dnf is painful to install - you have to layer it on top of the base image, and then that makes it "nonstandard" basically from then on. I know they push you toward flatpaks, but the vast majority of apps I use don't have it (or I don't prefer using the Flatpak version).

Can anyone give a more recent perspective? It's been about two years - I probably used Fedora Atomic 35/36.

View on HN

I use Bazzite. It includes nix and fleek, so you can easily install packages from the massive nixos ecosystem.

I then add JetPack's devbox which is another nix porcelain and use it with direnv to install custom packages for each of my projects.

And I have a few distrobox's (toolbox on generic Silverblue) to do things like build Debian packages.

Bazzite's sibling Bluefin is specifically meant for developers (the bluefin-dx image) and standard daily driver. Bazzite is targeted more towards gaming and Steam handheld although you can use it as a desktop too.

https://projectbluefin.io/

I tried Bluefin and it's still early days and such. Also Bluefin has gaming images, so it seems it's weirdly trying to compete with Bazzite.

Also Bazzite has an issue open to make `-dx` images.

It seems both are trying to do it all with a different main focus. Bazzite is Gaming but can do other stuff just as well. Bluefin is Dev but can do others.

I personally find Bazzite more diverse and capable.

I'm using Silverblue 39 for about 2 month coming from NixOS Unstable. It's working very well for me. I have some packages layered like Nvidia and fish shell and https://github.com/CheariX/silverblue-akmods-keys for AKMODS modules work with secure boot. Things like neovim, pyright, helix, starship, LSPs and CLI applications I install with brew (brew.sh). For desktop things I use Flatpak.

I had a problem with some Flatpak applications (like Steam and Discord) and brew because brew puts its folder in the $PATH before the default ones (/usr/bin ...) and those Flatpak applications tried to use SSL keys from brew instead of the system ones. I just changed the order of the $PATH to make brew bin path to be after ther system ones.

For VSCode I'm not using the Flatpak I'm using the tarball one I just extract in ~/applications and symlink the code binary in the ~/.local/bin. It's working well, I don't have problem with VSCode not executing LSPs and lint things. The only problem is VSCode from tarball cannot updates itself, so I need to download the newer version and extract to ~/applications. There is this VSCode CLI version (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/?dv=linux64cli) but I was not able to make it use the wayland backend.

Ah, glad to hear it's working well! I recall layering issues but I'm going to look into switching over. Thanks :)

> a kernel update borked my laptop, and for some reason it deleted the older versions

Deleted older versions? That sounds severe. I hope you filed a bug report if there wasn't one already.

Did you change your installonly_limit?

Hm, going back and checking the dnf log, I believe the old kernels disappearing was due to chrooting in a few times before, in my efforts to try to force it to install the older kernel. perhaps it cleaned the package cache or otherwise uninstalled/ran autoremove.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com