Thanks for the clarification!

I hope you’re not implying that NixOS is the only distro you’re comfortable with. Pretty impressive if you’ve jumped ship directly to NixOS, though.

With all due respect, the biggest takeaway would be that you should never recommend a distro before you’re comfortable with it yourself.

From Star Labs their StarLite tablet looks very attractive. Right now I considering buying a tablet for drawing and a laptop for 3D modeling instead of 2-in-1.

Honestly, this makes a lot of sense. It’s unfortunate that all of your needs aren’t satisfied by a single device. Assuming that the drawing capabilities of the Starlite and Infinityflex are up to par, their hardware specs don’t come even close to Blender’s recommended. So opting for a second device may indeed be necessary.

Whatever you’ll end up picking, I hope you and your wife will be satisfied with the end result 😉!

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.

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*.

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.

I had something similar going on in Fedora Silverblue. I didn’t really want to fiddle with it at the moment, so I just uninstalled whatever I got from ProtonVPN and the update went smooth afterwards. I hope someone else can point you towards a better answer.

Quite the contrary, the commit log on Github looks pretty healthy.

On what did you base the following:

it has not been updated since a while.

You can still edit it. Please consider doing so 😅.