I’ve been feeling gushy about my setup lately, I think I’ve finally found my home on Linux. For decades I’ve distrohopped each year and never was really happy with it all, but Fedora Atomic has changed that.
Some things I can do with Fedora Atomic that I cannot do with other Linux distros:
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I can rebase to Bazzite for gaming performance when I feel like having a long gaming session.
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I can rebase to Secureblue when I think I will not be gaming and would prefer a more secure linux setup.
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I can update my system and not have to worry about special instructions, its extremely stable. Many times in the past, running a small ma-and-pa distro with most things pre-configed for performance would end with it breaking after a couple of major updates. This isn’t true for configs like Bazzite and Secureblue, they are remarkably stable across many major updates due to how rpm-ostree functions.
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Distrobox and Flatpak are more than enough at this stage for most programs and they help you avoid making too many alterations to the base image, greatly speeding up the swaps between major images.
The kicker? Your user configs and home files are never changed when you ‘image hop’. It always feels like you just installed a fresh distro whenever you upgrade, and the performance benefits are noticeable. You don’t have to tinker and do the same changes over and over, its all handled for you by rpm-ostree.
10/10 this is the future of Linux. I hope for a future where I can rebase entire Linux distros while maintaining my configs with one simple command, but for now, Fedora Atomic is fantastic.
The downsides:
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There is one major downside, and its that all of your system files are read-only. Personally, I’ve found a dozen ways to get around this, it requires thinking inside the Distrobox. It is a notable issue for many people, though. This means you cannot make specific tweaks without making a whole new image for yourself. Though in practice, I have found the ecosystem has grown a lot. Other people have already made the best tweaks available for you with only a few simple commands.
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Rpm-ostree also is slow to update because its essentially building a whole git tree to make sure your updates never break and are as stable as possible. You also have to reboot each time you alter it, which can be annoying, but if you stick to flatpaks and distroboxes, this issue is mitigated significantly.
huh, very interesting. I think I’ll give Bazzite a shot and see how it goes. I have an T490 kicking around, but it only has the Intel UHD graphics (no NVIDA Mobile chip, sadly), but on Windows it could handle some gaming. So, I’ll be curious to see how it works out. The Bazzite site says it doesn’t support the “Steam Gaming Mode”, which just means the steam big picture mode.
Adding that what they said above is correct. I personally hop between secureblue and bazzite depending if I want to game that day. Works great
I also have it on an old laptop which atomic is great for leaving unupdated for a long time and updating it without config when you need it
Ok I’ve spent a few hours now tinkering and figuring things out, and I totally see the power here. I wanted to install the 1password Linux application and discovered I could do it easily using distrobox, and I wouldn’t even know that’s how it was running considering the GUI experience is the same as if I had installed it directly on the system.
Very cool. It’s a little to bad the gaming experience isn’t great, but this is a 8 year old laptop with intel UHD graphics, so not shocked really. Windows gets better performance naturally.
It really depends on the game. Old games often run better on Linux than on windows. Check protondb to see how supported the game is, may be a driver issue. Old Nvidia parts use proprietary drivers which suck in comparison to old AMD parts which use open source drivers on Linux. New Nvidia parts use open source drivers, though these drivers are new and still having the kinks worked out. Sometimes laptops even have specific proprietary drivers that must be used for the laptop which can break compatibility with Linux or reduce performance. I’m pretty sure Intel is in the same boat, it’s proprietary.
Personally, for games I enjoy, I saw a small 5fps performance increase over windows on a newish desktop.