Bazzite Bazzite Bazzite!

I was at the same point a while ago.

Everything I touch breaks, and I also had enough of my system breaking because updating with an unstable power grid is like playing russian roulette.

I turned to Fedora Silverblue first, then rebased to uBlue. Aurora first, and then Bazzite. Silverblue feels exactly as the regular variant, Aurora is great for desktop use, and for my gaming PC, Bazzite is fucking great. It just works.

It comes with a lot of tweaks and super many small additions that just make your life easier, especially for gaming.

Updates just happen in the background when there’s nothing better to do and get applied to the next boot image. And in case something doesn’t work as expected, you can always go back in time.

You can also customise it almost/ just as much as regular distros, but it isn’t quite as easy if you want to customise A LOT (e.g. using TWMs).

I didn’t notice huge performance boosts tho, it just comes with more tools ootb, for example to make your GPU more silent when idle.

As said, Bazzite is based on Fedora, so you always get new great modern stuff, at the same time as the other Fedora users do.

I use Casa"OS". It’s fine, but nothing groundbreaking. Cockpit for example can do pretty much the same, and for Docker containers, I nowadays mostly use docker compose.

But hey, it helped me a quite a bit in the beginning, and it’s cool. Pretty basic, but enough for most people, mainly beginners.

Logseq and Obsidian are only similar on the first look, but very different usage wise. Both are very open with a plugin system, and you can modify them to turn them into one eachother.

So, if you want only FOSS, then Logseq is the only choices you have.

But Obsidian is, even though it’s proprietary, very sane. Open plug-in system, active community, great devs who don’t have much against FOSS, and more.

Obsidian

• More similar to a classic note taking app, like OneNote, but with a lot of features. Hierarchical structure, and more of an “essay” style, where you store a lot of text in one page.
• Page linking is only done when you think it makes sense
• Has been a bit longer around than Logseq, feels more polished
• Great sync and mobile app, which support plugins from what I’ve heard

Logseq

• Non-linear outliner. Every page is on the same level, but within a text passage, the indentation matters (parent-child-relationship)
• You create a LOT of more pages. Most of my pages are empty. They are mainly there for linking topics. I rarely create pages manually.
• The journal is where you write most stuff. You then link each block to a page.
• Logseq a bit “special”. May not be for everyone. I for example am a bit of a disorganised thinker, who mentally links a lot of knowledge and throws concepts around all the time. Logseq is my second nature, because it’s more flexible. My GF on the other hand is more structured, and prefers something like Apple Notes, or, if she would care about note taking, something like Obsidian.
• The mobile app isn’t great. It’s fine when I’m not at home, but the desktop version is the “proper” one, and mobile/ iPad a second class citizen.
• Sync is only experimental for now. It will soon be officially supported (hopefully) and self hostable, but it worked fine for me.

I don’t see any problems with that. Even I (and probably most others here), who are FOSS advocates, think Obsidian’s model is fine.

The devs surely get why FOSS is important, and try their best to match the pros of open source. They even stated that if the company goes bankrupt or they stop developing the app, they’ll open source it.

One major thing they do absolutely right is how the notes get stored. On other note taking apps, it’s a proprietary database, often “in the cloud”, where your notes get hold hostage. Here, they’re just Markdown files, and the whole thing is pretty open, encouraging a strong community.

It’s similar to Valve/ Steam. Proprietary, but liked by most Linux people.

Each to their own. Linux is, in my opinion, about choice. If one prefers everything to be ultra minimalist, native and lightweight, then that’s fine.

I personally just find to be Linux’ most overlooked strength is containerization. It’s one of the main reasons why most servers run Linux, because of things like Docker. On the desktop, containers are way underutilized, but that’s now slowly changing with things like Flatpak or Distrobox.

A distrobox container is technically more bloated than a native install, sure, that’s correct.

But, in my opinion, it’s like saying “Drawers and closets are bloat for my apartment. I throw everything on the floor.” Yeah, now you have less things in your room, but it looks like shit, you can’t find anything and you fall over your tubberware that’s mixed with your underwear and shampoo.

Having everything collected in a container only costs me a few hundred MBs and a small amount of RAM if needed. But, literally every PC has more than 50 GB hard drive space and 8 GB RAM. If your system slows down because of one container, then your PC is the problem, not distrobox.

That absolutely doesn’t mean we should stop optimizing software of efficiency. But it can help us to spend our time on more important stuff, like fixing bugs or adding new cool features.

I really love Flatpak because of that. Sure, it has some drawbacks, but as soon as more devs support Flatpak officially, and iron out some issues we currently have, like misconfigured permissions, they’re (imo) the best package format. Why should a distro maintainer have to apply every software change to their package format? That’s needlessly duplicated work.

Just a small (or maybe big?) tip for you 🙂

If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date

There’s a tool called Distrobox.
You can install it (via CLI I think?), and then manage it the easiest graphically way via BoxBuddy (available in your Software Center), or just the terminal if you prefer it.

With it, you can screw all those “Doesn’t work on my distro” moments.

You’re on Linux Mint? No problems, here’s the AUR for you!

✨✨✨ BONUS: Your OS won’t break anymore randomly due to some AUR incompatibility, because everything is containerized! ✨✨✨

Even if you run Arch, use it to install AUR stuff. Or Debian/ Ubuntu, add PPAs only via Distrobox.

It’s absolutely no virtual machine. It basically only creates a small, lightweight container with all dependencies, but it runs on your host. Similar to Flatpaks.

You can also export the software, and then it’s just like you would have installed it natively!
Your distro choice doesn’t matter anymore. You now can run any software written only for Suse, an abandoned Debian version 10 years ago, Arch, Fedora, Void, whatever. It’s all the same.

I hope that was helpful :)

If you want to use this laptop with Linux and not spend time fixing hardware compatibility issues, then I definitely would not recommend this laptop. Definitely get a Dell XPS for a Linux laptop that Just Works.

Have you tried the -framework images from uBlue?

I would recommend Bazzite or Aurora/ Bluefin. Bluefin is Gnome, and Aurora is KDE.

Both Bazzite and Bluefin are very similar. Bazzite is gaming focused, and the other one is more general purpose, but you can use them interchangeably and also rebase from one to the other.

They are the poster childs of the uBlue project, which uses, modifies and redistributes Fedora Silverblue images.

They both are part of the Fedora Atomic family, which makes them nearly indestructible, convenient and secure.

They focus a lot on containerised workflows, e.g. Distrobox, Flatpak, Homebrew, and, as you mentioned, Nix. They all come pre-installed, and if they don’t work ootb (e.g. Nix), they are just one ujust command away.

I have used both over the past year and I couldn’t be more happy. Give them a try!

Logseq! Right now, you can only self host the database and sync it with Syncthing for example, but the dedicated sync feature is currently in beta and will be self hostable afaik.

Grocy is exactly what you asked for.

That’s actually quite cool to know.
I’ve always wanted to make my own Cola, especially since I can’t tolerate even small amounts of caffeine. Thanks!

Go with Bazzite instead.

The Nvidia drivers come pre-bundled with your install and are baked into the image itself.
The good thing is, they won’t break, and if they should, you can just roll back to yesterday’s image by just rebooting. It’s extremely reliable and lets you just dive into your optimal gaming experience straight away.

Don’t use Manjaro. The dev team is very sketchy and it’s a very unreliable distro. If you really want Arch, for whatever reason, use EndeavourOS. I personally don’t like the rolling release model and find Fedora (Bazzite) just right. If I need something from the AUR, then I use Distrobox.

PopOS is too old for me, and isn’t evolving at all right now. I would skip it until Cosmic is ready.

I never had any (major) problems with Nextcloud yet.

I just have following “conflicts” with it:

• It doesn’t follow the “Do one thing, and do it right”-philosophy. It tries to do everything at once. File upload/ sharing, media management (NC Photos), RSS, mail, calendar, contacts, and much, much more. I mean, it’s damn convenient and works pretty fine, but nothing is great. For example, Immich/ Photoprism is way better than NC for photo management.
• There’s a lot of abandonware, or buggy/ unmaintained apps. For example, my “News”-feed looks completely broken for months now.
• The performance isn’t good. I mean, the “server” (an old thin client) isn’t fast at all, but the loading times and responsiveness is just awful. The file upload also takes ages, even from the same network.
• It feels bloated. I think, if I would be more into selfhosting and had more time, I would search for alternatives and split all the NC features I use into their own services, e.g. one for file upload, one for document management, one for managing my photos, an own RSS client, and more.

But, as I said, the ease of use and amount of features is still great. I don’t want to spend three weekends just troubleshooting my server and searching for/ installing dozens of individial services. And for that, it’s good enough.

If you have a spare laptop/ PC, I insist you to try Nextcloud.

It’s super easy to install, you actually just download the Docker all-in-one container and it runs in less than 10 minutes. You don’t have much to loose.
I’m relatively happy with it.

I mean, to be fair, NC isn’t perfect. It sometimes feels a bit wonky and tries to do everything, while exceeding at nothing.
But it’s damn comfortable to set up and maintain.

It doesn’t perfectly cover your use case, but everything else (individual services, including web server, database, etc.) is less centralised and more complicated to set up.
Since NC AIO is inside a container, all data are too. It’s a relatively straightforward file system afaik.
Backup also is included, but you have to do it manually by default and it stops the services while doing it.

For offloading large files, you might look into 3rd party tools. NC is basically a remote drive you can connect to with most programs that support it.

I get the same messages, despite using uBlue.
It’s because of Flatpak.

I disabled the notifications and enabled daily/ weekly auto-updates of Flatpaks, otherwise I would get spammed to oblivion.