For years, I’ve gotten by with a desktop at home running Arch and a work laptop running Kubuntu. Now I want a laptop that’s not owned by my job, so that I can use a computer outside the house and not have my workplace own the IP rights of whatever I do on it. My workload is basically just going to be emacs and web browsing, so basically any distro can do it.

I’ve already got the laptop (HP Elitebook 840 G5, secondhand), but now it’s time for the distro. I don’t plan to use this laptop often, since it’ll mostly be when I travel a few times a year. I don’t want Arch, because I don’t want to install 6 months of software updates the night before a vacation and then hope that everything works.

Thus, I’m looking at Fedora Silverblue, since that can apply updates atomically on the system, and I can always roll back. I’m wondering if anyone else has good recommendations for a distro to serve my needs.

  • di5ciple@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    NixOS, i was a long time btrfs with snapshots Arch user. But Nix is just more stable and makes my life happy knowing it will always work as a server, desktop, or on a laptop. The config file is easy to read as documentation as code. That can reproduce the setup and even use flakes and home-manager to copy all your dot-files with ease. Just modify the version number in the file to update it and all apps are independent of each other with no weird dependencies. Better rollbacks then btrfs as it uses systemd and you can save git of your configuration files. This is the future

      • imnotneo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        slightly unrelated but I use i3 and use volume hardware keymaps. would be nice to have a tray alsa source switcher etc. don’t know if one exists. for the stupid work meetings

        • Shikadi@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I also use i3 and volume key maps, the tray icon I use is just called volumeicon and it can be used to switch sources. I think it has optional dependencies to do it though

    • outbound@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You’re right! We need more cowbell Debian. I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is Debian!

  • garam@lemmy.my.idEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Got with Fedora, Fedora Kionite, Silverblue, anything. rpm ostree, and if you need other things, go with distrobox. RPM OS Tree will be standard near future, I think.

    But I will stick with XFCE Spin tho

  • Bombastic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Voting for debian as well. Apt upgrade never gave me any hassle when i needed to update anything in a pinch

  • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.comEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    Xubuntu would be a nice easy one to install. Look into Arch as well. I actually run Arch just about everywhere and really like it.