While the landscape of ‘atomic’ distros may look thriving, we can distill the amount of mature projects to just NixOS, Guix System and Fedora Atomic (and their derivatives).

Most of the other projects found e.g. here are unfortunately not worth your time in most cases.

As for which one to go with, that definitely depends on what you desire out of it (in alphabetical order):

• Do you want something that’s relatively easy to start out with? Then go with Fedora Atomic (or a derivative^[1]). From my personal testing, this one also seems to be the friendliest in terms of taking away many footguns.
• If two of the following strike a chord with ya, then you should heavily consider Guix Systems:
  • Enjoying/liking^[2] Lisp
  • Being passionate about F(L)OSS
  • Enjoying NixOS as a model, but being discontent with something^[3] that happens to be (better) (re)solved on Guix Systems
• NixOS is the OG^[4]. As such, there’s a lot of cruft. But within that mess, somehow, ironically, it holds the potential for setting up the cleanest OS. As you can guess, without a shred of doubt, it is the most mature and most powerful out of the bunch. So, if you’ve got exotic places you’d like to go with your distro, then -in a lot of cases- this is the only viable destination.

older computer

What are the specs?

Is there a way to just reset and do everything over like by repartitioning and installing something like Fedora or Ubuntu?

You mean wipe everything on your HDD/SSD and install something that can make use of all of its storage capacity? That’s basically included on every distro installer.

I can’t get Ethernet or my VPN working

That’s definitely not expected behaviour.

I want to be able to download “app” “installers” like you do with PC or MacOS.

What do you mean? Is it either one of the following? (Perhaps both are fine with ya?)

• Download software from a website and install it?
• Use a app/software store application in which you can find and install apps/software? This is basically what’s found on modern phones.

What do y’all think of Zorin, should I still migrate to something more ubiquitous and longer-running?

Zorin OS should be fine~ish. The problem with asking the community is that they’re often more interested in laying out their favorites rather than what would be closest to the objectively best option 😅. If, however, your problems with ethernet persist on Zorin OS while another distro’s live ISO doesn’t have that problem, then I suppose it would only make sense to switch.

That depends.

If this is a Linux guest on a Linux host and both are just your average distros, then it’s fine~ish. It’s not 100% safe as some malware is able to escape a VM, see this for a recent example of this.

Doing your shady stuff within a disposable air-gapped^[1] VM on a RISC-V powered Sculpt OS host should be pretty safe, though.

in general: for my personal daily use pc. I download 🏴‍☠️ files and software for websites around the internet, so it would be nice have an antivirus

Aight. Understood. Thank you for the clarification!

So…, now it becomes a question of how paranoid security-sensitive you are 😅. I suppose relying on a distro with pretty decent security defaults (like e.g. Fedora or openSUSE) makes sense for a start. Furthermore, definitely commit to best practices^[1]. As for the scanning part, other comments have already touched on that.

If the PC you’re doing this contains sensitive information OR you’re not satisfied with the provided “probably good enough” solution, then consider going “the extra mile”. Which would involve the use of specialized OSes, relying on VMs and whatnot. But I digress…

in specific: i want to self host services in my home server, so i want it to be secure and protected

Unfortunately, I’m not confident talking on servers specifically. It’s simply not something I’ve put serious thoughts to yet. I hope someone else will touch on that 😉.

OP, I’ll be honest with ya: if you’re looking for something akin to M$ Defender but on Desktop Linux (and free), you ain’t gonna find it.

A quick look at your Lemmy history suggests that you’re security-conscious. In that context, it’s worth noting that ‘Linux’ does provide you. However, depending on your situation and/or threat model, this might come at the cost of expertise.

If you never download random stuff from the internet, then your average distro might be sufficient as long as you commit to the most basic set of best practices.

However, if you do download random stuff from the internet OR if your situation and/or threat model warrants a more conscious approach, then things might change substantially.

But before subjecting you to Qubes OS, we’d have to know more about your situation. So, first of all, could you elaborate on your use case of ClamAV? Or, perhaps even what you intend to do in general?

FWIW, Lenspect is not capable of selecting a folder and scanning all of its contents^[1] (yet). For that (and more), there is vt-cli (source); maintained by (more or less) the same people that brought us VirusTotal. List of repos in which it’s found.

Huh? Last time I checked, SteamOS literally removed user-installed (non-flatpak) packages.

I agree that it’s a pity that the first couple of flatpak packages take up a lot of space for what they are. But that shouldn’t bother most modern systems.

Ah okay, thanks for clarifying!

FYI, DistroWatch isn’t a very reliable metric for gauging the user base of any given distro. Heck, strictly speaking, I’m unaware of any metric that does this any justice besides the opt-out DNF Count Me found on Fedora-based distros. And we will use exactly that to discredit DistroWatch!

So, Fedora (1112^[1]) has put out a number (relatively) recently; 961k users. And Bazzite (770) outright displays it on their website; 90.8k users. Like, Fedora is roughly 10 times as big as Bazzite. But their respective DistroWatch rankings don’t quite reflect that.

I don’t agree with the sentiment that Linux Mint is underrated either. As you note, it is quite popular and is mentioned a lot in the discourse.

However, I don’t think that CachyOS and Linux Mint are the most popular distros; that undoubtedly goes to Ubuntu. And, if anything, I’d think that Linux Mint is more popular than CachyOS.

Yet, if we’d limit it to the distros used by gamers, then CachyOS probably does take the crown for most used distro (aside from SteamOS). At least, there are metrics that suggest as such.

Sorry for the late reply

No worries fam 🙂.

thank you for taking your time!

It has been my pleasure 🙂.

I have “defaulted” back to Artix, having fixed the NIC issue.

Glad to hear that you were able to return back to your home.

And I agree, Gentoo is what I dream of being able to handle, but all the USE flags KILLED me when I set it up for the first time a month or so ago. xD I do want to get back to it at some point though.

Good mindset! I’m sure you’ll manage whenever you get back to it 😉.

Hmm…, not sure if it satisfies your requirement, but you can basically create your desktop from Emacs. You may find an example below.

See exwm

You can access those past images/snapshots even from a new install ;) .

As it seems to have been some time since it started, I’d suggest trying out the oldest still accessible snapshot/image.

Others have basically already pointed out how you should go about diagnosing the problem. Which, by itself, is already very valuable.

Below, I will try to touch upon some tips and tricks that are worth noting in this context, assuming Bazzite*.

• Pinning a specific deployment to return back to. As we’ll be doing some time traveling in a bit, it’s definitely recommended to pin your latest deployment (just in case) before you do anything else. See this entry in Bazzite’s documentation on that.
• Rolling back to images from a certain day. So, IIRC, all of the uBlue products keep around 90 days worth of images you can rollback to. See Bazzite’s documentation on brh for more information. With this (and some effort), you can literally pinpoint the exact date from which you started to have problems with gamescope/game mode.
• Looking into the exact changes between two deployments. So, after you’ve identified the last properly working deployment and the first deployment that started misbehaving, you can invoke the rpm-ostree db diff command to see what has changed between the two deployments. Note two things on this:
  • That the hashes coincide with the ones you actually want to compare.
  • The command catches only changes in packages. However, a config diff applied by Bazzite’s maintainers will not be shown here.
• Asking help from community channels. You can even start here. But basically, a project’s discord/discourse is undoubtedly better equipped in helping you out. See this entry on Bazzite’s documentation for links.

Wish ya good luck fam 😉!

Alright, excellent. Thank you for the reply!

So, IIUC, you want a clean slate. Furthermore, you want plenty of tinkerability. And, finally, OpenRC enjoys a preference.

Still, I want to limit our search (for now) to (relatively) upstream distros on which OpenRC is known to work pretty well. We have to start our search from somewhere and this seems to be the most sensible starting point at this point.

If you’ve dismissed Artix, that basically leaves us (in alphabetical order) with:

• Alpine
• Debian
• Devuan
• Gentoo

IIRC, most (if not all) of these offer very minimal images. So, hopefully you’ll enjoy those.

Thankfully, these are meaningfully different from eachother (for the most part). So choosing between these shouldn’t be too much to ask.

FWIW, Gentoo comes undoubtedly with the least amount of defaults and thus behaves the most like a blank slate.

I am most fond of Arch

But what is it that you like about Arch in the first place?

I found that I’m more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.

Like, do you want to limit your options to distros that are well supported by OpenRC? Or, is this simply a preference kind of thing?

the Artix forums also seem to house at least some transphobia

Do you want to engage in distro-specific forums or was your engagement in there mostly out of necessity?

as opposed to configured by me.

Excellent, so you’re a builder/tinkerer that prefers a clean slate to work from.

Assuming you’re involved with the development on AstrOS, thank you first of all for your efforts and secondly for providing your perspective on the matter!

Imo it generally does too much.

Oh, I can definitely see that; probably the consequence of retrofitting an OCI/Docker image into an OS 😅. I suppose that its relation with (rpm-)ostree doesn’t help either.

Systemd-sysupdate being simple as hell makes it just way more solid.

That’s some cool insight. Thank you.

I think it also depends on grub and stuff

I believe it did, yes. But, AFAIK, systemd-boot has been supported since earlier this year. I believe that change has also been instrumental in the relatively recent activities surrounding so-called sealed images.

I remember hearing even all the Fedora-based atomic distros don’t use UKI, so they are vulnerable to initramfs modifications

This has been a thing for the longest time. But the situation has been changing since about a year ago. That work has eventually led to the release of so-called sealed bootc images. Which, in turn, has led (some) projects to start active development on that. From what I know, projects like secureblue are even dogfooding their respective UKIs as we speak.

So, we’ve come a long way and it wouldn’t surprise me if many projects will ship their respective sealed images (alongside their regular images) before the end of the year.

However, there are some glaring issues that need to be addressed, most prominently of which is the loss of layering. Sealed images don’t support layering and probably won’t either. Of course, many different alternatives exist, including system extensions, creating your own custom image with those packages baked in, going the RakuOS-route and probably many others I’m unaware of or forgot about. But, AFAIK, none of the alternatives are as mature as layering has become.

What problems does bootc have? I’m genuinely curious*.

IIRC, it’s another brain child of Mirko Brombin; the prolific designer that’s also prominently involved with Bottles, Singularity Desktop/OS and Vanilla OS.

I wish it the best. Especially since Flatpak’s sandboxing didn’t have any competition up till now. At least, AFAIK*.

Aight. We seem to have found the culprit. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.|

I mean why would it say a stable image has a testing id and bootloader if its not testing

I’m not familiar with the Bazzite Update Tool. I tried to find it on GitHub, but failed 😅. But, if I’d have to guess, it looks at the same wrong place that fastfetch does.