Consider giving devices offered by NovaCustom a look.

When it comes to Linux-first laptop vendors, it’s definitely my favorite out of the bunch.

On purchasing one of their devices, they offer:

• 3 years of warranty
• 5 years of firmware update support
• 7 years of (guaranteed) spare parts availability

I’m simply unaware of any other (Linux-first) firm that can compete regarding the above.

And I haven’t even mentioned how vast their customization options are, or how well-praised their support is.

I’m actually stunned why it’s not mentioned more often in these conversations.

Btw, I’d actually recommend you to consider the whereabouts of the respective support centers before you buy a device. You never hope to be in that situation, but it makes a real difference when it matters. So, in case you’re unaware, AFAIK:

• NovaCustom; Netherlands. But as long as you’re in EU mainland, it should be good enough.
• Star Labs; UK. EU outside of Great Britain is OK.
• System76; USA.
• Tuxedo; Germany. Again, EU mainland is fine.

Thank you for the clarification 😊!

I tried to find sources on that but failed. Could you help me out?

The .deb package can be found on Github.

I find it peculiar that it doesn’t seem to be packaged by any distro. Debian does have a package called level-zero. But, while they’re linked, it doesn’t seem to be the exact same thing.

Edit: It’s packaged under intel-compute-runtime.

Thank you for the reply! And apologies for the late response*.

First of all, I owe you another apology for the deleted comment; I was still in the process of cooking and accidentally sent the undercooked message.

They will get a little more respect from me when they stop trying to target programmers and gamers. Because of course everyone uses Steam and VScode.

As per its README (I’m paraphrasing):

Bazzite started as a project to resolve some of the issues that plague SteamOS:

• Mainly out of date packages (despite an Arch base).
• The lack of a functional package manager.
• Issues pertaining to persistence of installed software across updates. (Reinstalling that obscure VPN software you spent an hour trying to get working in SteamOS isn’t fun.)
• No easy full disk encryption OOTB.
• No Secure Boot support.

Like, SteamOS is a pretty cool operating system that allows both Linux enthusiasts and Linux newbs to enjoy playing (most of) their favorite games on Linux. But the former may find it too restrictive, while the latter may want to import that experience over to other devices. Bazzite aims to be that solution. Were it not for the success of the Steam Deck (and by extension SteamOS), such pressing need wouldn’t even have arisen. So Bazzite isn’t trying to target gamers as “an easy way to attract users” (or whatever the insinuation may be); its raison d’être is to address SteamOS’ limitations.

Regarding the targeting of programmers, you could be right on that. But I suppose it’s fine as VS Code’s inclusion (and other goodies) is only confined to the respective -dx images. I regard Bluefin (and Aurora; its KDE Plasma spin-off) as the opinionated distro its maintainers like to use for themselves (i.e. programmers). I’d argue this actually makes it suitable for most people. But your average Linux user is a lot more sensitive towards ‘bloat’. So it’s definitely not for everyone.

It just feels very much like it is being run by young edgy programmers.

I guess my reply would be that I simply don’t feel that way. And factually, it’s being worked on by people that work (or have worked) at places like Canonical, Red Hat and (even) Microsoft. So, while that doesn’t necessarily dismiss them as being “young edgy”, it does make it easy to trust and be confident in their proficiency and competence. I wonder what other distros are maintained by such a star ensemble.

It is the same group that is trying to force crappy “dark mode” everywhere.

This is probably some meme or meta joke/reference I didn’t get. Please feel free to enlighten me.

What’s the bigger program is the lack of internet knowledge about how to fix problems. With Ubuntu and Debian there are tons of stack overflow pages on all of the various issues. Sure things have changed over time but it still the most documented distro. I can look up “how do I fix X Linux Mint” and I will get an answer. With the Bazzite immutable base almost all of the help online will be useless.

I admitted to as such in my first comment. But, what if, instead of looking up questions in your favorite search engine, you visit their support channels and get the exact answer within a couple of moments? This last bit has been based on my own experience*.

Immutable Linux requires that you understand Linux under the hood.

Instinctively, I just absolutely have to disagree on this. The most clear-cut counterexample would be how NixOS -the granddaddy of immutable atomic distros if you will- doesn’t adhere to many Linux conventions (including FHS). Therefore, “understanding (traditional) Linux under the hood” might have even been detrimental and wasteful for the many things you’d have to unlearn.

Beyond the overlap in Linux 101 that most distros adhere to and/or the basics everyone should know about their operating system, could you please demonstrate how “understanding (traditional) Linux under the hood” becomes necessary with atomic distributions?

Maybe PikaOS?

But, IIRC, they are not innovative like CachyOS is; CachyOS actually tries to push performance enhancements forward. PikaOS, on the other hand, only implements the improvements found by others (like CachyOS).

deleted by creator

Don’t go straight to immutable Linux.

My first foray into Linux was through what you’d refer to as immutable Linux; shortly after the release of Fedora Kinoite. I’m literally the embodiment of the antithesis to your statement.

It is very new

This is factually true. So I can’t simply deny that. But being more precise is helpful:

• Fedora Atomic, the family of distros that enable uBlue, has been in the works since 2014. This eventually culminated into the release of Fedora Atomic Workstation in 2018, which was the name of Fedora Silverblue before the name change.
• The first commit of uBlue as a project happened over three years ago.
• The 1.0 release of Bazzite happened over a year ago.
• By contrast, Linux Mint has been out since 2006.

and I don’t like the focus.

Could you be more elaborate 😜?

First step: Decide on the so-called desktop environment. A shortlist is provided below. For a new user, this should be decisive when choosing between beginner-friendly distros.

Before going over to the next (and final) step, we need to set the stage for our contenders:

• Versions of Linux Mint. Linux Mint has (rightfully so) become the face of Linux for beginners. Stand out feature would be how crazy popular it is; it’s a joy to look up your problem through a search engine and find solutions for it.
• Images of uBlue. Where Linux Mint tries to smooth the rough edges of the “traditional Linux model” as nicely as possible, uBlue’s images can be referred to as revolutionary by comparison. The model strikes some (re)semblance to what you might know from your phone or chromebook. These images aren’t even close to reaching their full potential, but have already garnered/amassed a wide audience for how they (at least attempt to) solve some of Desktop Linux’ long-standing issues. Note that finding solutions for your problems might not be as straightforward. However, documentation is decent and they’ve been very helpful on Discord.

Final step: Pick the distro corresponding to your preferred desktop environment. The list found below (ordered alphabetically) isn’t trying to be exhaustive on desktop environments.

• Cinnamon; Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. This is their flagship and probably what people mean when referring to Linux Mint.
• GNOME; Bazzite’s GNOME. If you don’t intend to game, then consider Bluefin instead.
• KDE Plasma; Bazzite’s KDE Plasma. If you don’t intend to game, then consider Aurora instead.
• MATE; Linux Mint MATE Edition.
• Xfce; Linux Mint Xfce Edition.

Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it’s like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!

Great response! Much appreciated!

Interesting. Have you also tried openSUSE Aeon(/Kalpa)? Though I assume you’re a KDE user and thus waiting for Kalpa to become mature before a test ride.

Could you elaborate on what you didn’t like about Aurora and Bazzite; especially about how that experience made you more appreciative of openSUSE?

Thank you in advance!

What distro do you use

I daily drive secureblue.

and why?

Long story short; I love me some security. Unfortunately, My device is far from ideal for running Qubes OS. From within the remaining options, secureblue comes out on top for me.

Options include:

• Installing them through brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin.
• Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
• Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing nix to this effect.
• If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through rpm-ostree.

the fact that Fedora is the only (at the least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.

AFAIK, openSUSE Aeon(/Kalpa) does as well*.

Thank you for the kind words 😊!

Though, in retrospect, I hope the recommendation for Linux Mint works out for their issues regarding ACPI power states. Perhaps a bigger departure from Ubuntu (if at all) would have been beneficial here.

Yup; at least to some extent.

I don’t know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).

A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.

Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.

For Fedora specifically, people couldn’t regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.

Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it’s not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don’t think it has even peaked yet.

Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam’s chart -in which ProtonDB’s data is used- does indicate to this as well.

Just my 2 cents.

My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy.

So we have a bias towards Debian-based distros.

it’s not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn’t reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc).

However, a newer kernel is definitely preferred.

is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain.

And finally, healthy access to documentation.

Based on the above, I would not pick:

• Debian Stable or any distro based on it. They ship with the 6.1 kernel, which launched only a couple months (January 2023) after the launch of Zen 4 (September 2022). I’m aware that access to newer kernels is possible. However, at that point, why even bother with Debian Stable to begin with?
• While both of Debian’s Testing and Sid/Unstable branches have access to newer kernels from the get-go, distros that ship the latest kernel by default (e.g. Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives) are simply better for offering an end-user product.
• Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives are primarily dismissed for not being based on Debian. Though, the fact that they’re more towards the rolling release side of things does play a minor role as well. By their very nature, they will change. Hence it’s less ideal for “set-and-forget” setups.
• Pop_OS!’ team seems to be primarily focused on delivering their upcoming COSMIC DE. For this reason, the distro has been in relative limbo. Therefore, I can’t recommend it.
• TUXEDO OS is dismissed for being relatively unpopular. Lots of other Debian(/Ubuntu) derivatives are dismissed for various reasons.

Let’s get to the actual recommendation, Linux Mint seems to be tailor-made for your use case:

• Based on Ubuntu, but without Snaps. While you can choose to use Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) instead, that one doesn’t come with the latest kernel. So the recommendation is for (standard/vanilla) Linux Mint.
• Their forums are full with up-to-date and (relatively) well-written guides; while the excellent ArchWiki is arguably better, Linux Mint isn’t a slouch either. Furthermore, as Linux Mint is very popular, you can simply expect to find solutions to most things that might come up.