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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

I have...

I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the whole file system because my bash sucks.

Its Linux for babies, and it makes me happy.

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Further ass-kissing:

Also I forgot to mention I tried gaming on it via Steam and it works like a charm... Not so sure about bleeding edge AAA games since I don't play any of that, but at least for all my oldies it works just fine.

Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.

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> Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.

While I haven't experimented with it that much yet, Affinity (the new one, the one after the Canva acquisition) does work in Wine 10.20.

Now, I won't say it is a smooth experience, one of the workarounds that I needed to do is use Wine's virtual desktop so Affinity's tooltips are rendered correctly instead of being pure black, and the GUI does seem to not render correctly sometimes (it renders as white until something causes a redraw).

The Canva global marketing lead did say that Linux support is "being discussed seriously internally": https://techcentral.co.za/affinity-for-linux-canvas-next-big...

This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?

  > How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?

First 80% of a job typically takes 80% of the allocated time. The last 20% of a job typically takes another 80% of the allocated time.

Yeah, the 80/80 rule. That made me smile.

> This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?

CodeWeavers (developers of CrossOver and one of the main contributors and sponsors of Wine and related tools) actually offer something like this as a paid service for companies called PortJump:

https://www.codeweavers.com/portjump

I've had cases where running an app under wine worked better than the native linux port :/

Getting it running in linux is the easiest part dev wise.

It is the rest of the iceberg that causes problems.

- You need your support to be able to support linux which means they will need training and experience helping people in an entirely new system

- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above

- Gotta track bugs in twice as many places

- Need CI / CD for more platforms

etc

And then people wonder, why electron became a thing.

But most of those issues are because Linux doesn't have enough market share. No one brushes off Windows because they need to support Windows and they need to add CI/CD for Windows.

The combination issue is a real issue though that (as far as I know) is mostly solved with Flatpaks, or in case of games, by using the Steam Runtime.

Of course, it is a "chicken and egg" problem of "we don't want to support Linux because there aren't enough users using it" but "we don't want to use Linux because there aren't enough business supporting it".

Thankfully with improvements in Wine the need of having "native" Linux support is shrinking, but at the same time there is still a looooong way to go (like the issues I said before with Affinity).

Windows userland compatibility is outstanding. I can run most 30 year old Windows applications on Windows 11 without a problem. This makes it easy for a commercial vendor to support their applications on Windows.

The same is not at all true on Linux.

Right now at work, I’ve got a bunch of commercial apps built for RHEL9 for which I’m chasing vendors for new builds that work on RHEL10, for a variety of reasons. Dependencies like libXScrnSaver have simply been removed, and so apps linked against that library no longer work.

Funnily enough there are old Windows applications that do work on Wine, but doesn't work on Windows 11

>- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above

This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.

AppImage relies on the old, unmaintained and suid root fuse2. Not a wise choice in 2025.

This. OMG Affinity is the ONE piece of software I actively miss. I tried the wine setup for it and it just doesn't work to a usable extent.

Yeah, I thought that Affinity would work pretty well in Wine because I've seen a lot of people pointing to the "just follow the guide (AffinityOnLinux repo) and it will work!" but in my experience it didn't work that well as people were saying.

And the guide itself seems to be outdated, the guide says that you need to install some stubs/shims but doesn't say that happens if you don't do it (I think that it would crash) but at least in my experience it did "work" without them when using an up-to-date Wine version.

Sadly Photoshop also doesn't work, if you want to follow the rules and use Creative Cloud it won't work at all, if you decide to sail the seven seas and download an older Photoshop version it will work but it also has some annoying bugs (sometimes the canvas doesn't update after an edit until you try to do another edit).

Don't get me wrong I do think that Wine is an amazing project and I hope that it continues to improve, but sometimes people don't seem to actually point all the issues that it exist when running an application in Wine.

Wine has some gaping holes in some of its API implementations. Direct2D, for instance, has existed since Windows 7 but is badly implemented in Wine -- there is no antialiasing and the ArcTo() function draws a line. The MS documentation is not that great either, so fixing Wine isn't necessarily easier than porting to native.

Don’t they use Qt for their Win/macOS version already?

Not that there aren't trust issues with bigger projects but don't folks worry that the further down the "branch of a flavour of of a branch of a flavour" chain they go the higher and higher the risk of someone sneaking nefarious code through becomes? I guess there's a natural barrier in that the lesser known code bases become less of a target.

Sometimes I just find it wild with how much we talk about containers and sandboxes for the user space code we run that there's still regular recommendations for the random distro of the week published by who knows who.

We don't talk about that here. We're here to spit on Microsoft.

Universal blue images are built via public GitHub Actions runners. If you don’t trust them, fork it and use your own image.

How would that solve the problem of running the unaudited changeset between Fedora and Blue Fin and then between that and Universal Blue?

Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite are taking over my home.

I've been using desktop linux since before ubuntu, and I have never had so much confidence in my linux rigs. They are dependable, which is refreshing after boot-breaking updates have ruined my setups before.

As another anecdote in favor of Universal Blue's approach. My mother (who can't use a computer but to check email or regular websites) has been swapped to Aurora and has nothing but positive feedback.

Been 90 days with zero issues.

I thought about mentioning my mom, since she's been my number 1 tech support client since ever... And I was going to say that, I am so certain of how solid this distro is, that I would even install it on my mom's laptop without any hesitation.

I've not heard of Universal Blue before, so thank you both for mentioning it! Seems like a great step forward for Linux Desktop!

It's very good

To be fair, the people who barely use the computer are the easiest to move to Linux. As Mental Outlaw said, "to a normie, an OS is just a bootloader for Google Chrome". If all you do is check emails, it doesn't really matter what OS you have installed.

Switching to Linux hasn't been an issue for those users for a long time - it's usually gamers, users of professional software, or IT people with deeply established workflows who have troubles

I guess the only part that matters is updates, and atomic systems like Fedora Silverblue do allow you to enable automatic updates without the fear of breaking everything, which is great

Laptop battery life suffers greatly on Linux. When their Google Chrome bootloader is out of battery all day, it matters which OS they installed.

Doesn't matter though. Every single one of these "casual" users I know has a terribly outdated device with a broken battery that doesn't even charge anymore.

And I agree: if it works, why replace it?

This doesn't make much sense, ChromeOS is itself Linux, and those are prime "computers for parents" machines.

not the same thing at all. Different userspace that may or may not be that efficient at power, as well as well tested power management in the kernel for specific devices.

People who care deeply about unplugged battery life aren't on Windows to begin with.

Laptop battery is mostly an issue of inefficient CPUs nowadays. I don't know about other distros, but at least Fedora's default power saving settings give a battery life very much comparable to Windows. Which is obviously still nothing compared to macbooks or even snapdragon laptops.

My old man was using Ubuntu 20 years ago because all he needed was a browser and openoffice. Shoot, with a live cd you can even make computer use foolproof since it's impossible for them to permanently break it.

When my dad (83) was looking to replace his ancient Win7 Dell PC I convinced him to buy a MacMini since he's had an iPad for a long time, and more recently an iPhone.

Initially he was concerned about the "new" interface after using Windows since 3.11 days, but within an hour he was happy doing his usual "basic tasks" (email, basic Excel, Word for letters, printing, etc). He was amazed both his printers (colour/scanner, b&w) worked with zero hassle after simply plugging them in.

Now he loves the ability to FaceTime anyone in the family (kids, grandkids, etc.) at the click of a button using the webcam plugged into the Mini, and really enjoys the sync of photos, emails, notes, etc.

I think he would have really struggled with Windows 11 so I was tempted by an older-person friendly Linux distro if macOS wasn't an option.

Chromebooks are also pretty good if google sheets/docs would suffice for excel/word.

They usually work well with printers, but I've run into some situations where I was just plain unable to get it to work with my Brother laser printer after a certain ChromeOS update. They screwed up something with the CUPS drivers and it just never worked.

On MacOS at least I have a chance of being able to fix this stuff. ChromeOS is so locked down you can't even fix things.

Apple is by far the best integrated ecosystem for nontechsavy users; its incredible how they follow this approach; iPhone is since V1 (?) without manual.

Im looking fearfully into the future: What will happen to Apple product perfectness if any of these MBA or even PE guys is taking over CEO role?

I was originally blown away by Bazzite, which I run on my Legion Go, but then I discovered uCore (https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore) and haven't looked back! Running it on my homelab and multiple servers at work, its a wonderful server OS.

Keep an eye on the Graphite vecor app that's in development. It's Linux native I think.

I am curious.

Does the flatpak Firefox allows access to all folders?

Heya, not by default, but you can allow it.

> The current Linux desktop didn't get us there, but we believe that what was made, can be unmade.

This is a strange thing for them to say when they are pretty much a clone of Fedora Silverblue, with a few minor tweaks.

If Bluefin works for you, great. But I find their marketing rather pretentious.

I'm currently working on converting an ARM Chromebook to run a different userland from ChromeOS and have been wondering which distro to use. I've starting getting Nix on it, but I think I'll switch over to Bluefin based on your recommendation.

How does bluefin compare to Linux Mint? I ask because I always thought mint was Linux for babies.

I think bluefin is more of a distro for babies in the sense that it really protects itself leaving the user with very limited capacity to break things while mint, also an awesome distro is more of a nice drop in for users that want to feel familiar with their desktop environment and traditional configuration

I have an old pc lying around and will be installing bluefin today. Thanks for the inspiration.

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