Linux

This is promising. I’ve got the exact same laptop as you. Laughing at the need to make things complicated to keep your skills up.

You could use some sort of caffeine as a workaround. I do since sleep locks don't always work.

It sounds really strange, that you end up with the problems you described given your usage.

My systems are heavily modified/tweaked, so one would expect I would experience the problems you describe.

Given your usage, using an immutable distro sounds like a no-brainer to me, immutable Linux was created with your usage scenarios in mind.

In your shoes I would still try to pin point the root cause of the error, because in theory(TM) your usage should not be a problem for any of the mainstream Linux distros and we don't know if an immutable distro solves your trouble.

Given your 6 montish circle it sounds like some kind of accumulation? If the computer runs stable for several month, IMHO you can rule out hardware problems, unless you have a kernel update every 6 months... :-P

Can you be more specific about your hardware, laptop model and Ubuntu version you are using?

If you ever figure out what happened, or if you try out an immutable distro and it runs for a year for you, give us an update! :-)

Your immutable distro will not be tailored to your hardware by a team of qualified and paid engineers. I'm not entirely sure why the heck do you think immutability is the differentiating factor here.

I mean if you try to use anything like python packages or even try to build python from sources it is painful. The only way to create developer environment is to use something like nex develop shells and you need to care about passing to LD_LIBRARY_PATH all that you need. And nothing downloaded as a binary is not working... For example, if I'm working on a Java-maven project that includes maven-protobuf then it is not working for you because protoc binary for manylinux is made for a dynamic linkage... Overall developer experience is painful. And anything that is not in nixpkgs you cannot just download, build from source and use: you need to pack everything into packages with resolving all the dependencies by hands...

I'm not the one you posed your question towards, but it's related to Bazzite's relation to Fedora Atomic and uBlue.

To put it simply, dnf is the 'source of truth' when it comes to package management (i.e. finding, installing, updating, removing (etc) of packages) on (traditional/regular) Fedora. So, dnf is basically to Fedora what apt used to be to Ubuntu. Sure, you can use Flatpak or any other (additional) package manager. But, there's no need to unless the software you seek is not available for installation through dnf.

Bazzite, on the other hand, does not allow you to install any packages through dnf. Instead, rpm-ostree, flatpak, Toolbx/Distrobox and (exclusive to uBlue projects) brew (and ujust) are provided by default. But, you might have to learn when you'd have to use which and why.

To educate yourself on this, you should definitely consider reading up on the related entry within Bazzite's documentation. In general, there's a lot of very useful stuff in Bazzite's documentation. Therefore, if you intend to use Bazzite, you should definitely read through its documentation.

I really wanted to like it. I've used ansible and puppet for work and there, declarative configuration made sense because I need to duplicate the same thing 1000's of times.

For desktop, it was incredibly annoying to me to have to change my config file every time I wanted to install a new application. I still found myself messing with drivers which I hate on any OS.

My distro choices after Nix were meant to reduce the need to mess with drivers. Zorin and Mint have first-run installers for whatever card it detects (Nvidia for me at the time) which worked well enough.

By that point I had read about immutable distros but wasn't sure about them just yet. Since I was on a hopping spree I decided I'd try it out.

When the Bazzite install went well and 99% of the applications I wanted to install were flatpaks anyway, it was a perfect fit. I've been running docker containers on my Ubuntu server for years so BoxBuddy was a natural fit for things that aren't flatpaks (minecraft runs great in one). What's more, KDE has a lot of keyboard combinations the same as Windows by default which made the switch even better for me. One that I had been fighting to add to gnome, which is admittedly small but annoying, the ability to use Meta+period to bring up an emoji selector, was built right into KDE by default?! I couldn't believe it.

Then, I started looking for an equivalent to FancyZones found in Windows PowerToys and... What do you know, that's also built into KDE by default?

Then a friend of mine gave me an AMD graphics card he was getting rid of which was an upgrade to my GTX 1060 I've been using since 2018. Since I had already moved to Bazzite, it was a simple re-base to move to the AMD version and it went off without a hitch.

It's all over, Bazzite and KDE are home for me now.

no, a container is not a virtual machine. Containers, unlike virtual machines, uses the same kernel as host system. That means you cannot spin up a windows container on linux because windows uses NT kernel and linux uses linux kernel. What containers like that will in fact do is allow you to get applications from different distros as if you were running that distro.

For your use case (windows xp game emulation) there are two options. A virtual machine or using wine. My suggestion is to try first "bottles" and then VM

Yeah kinda. A container has a lot better performance than a virtual machine and can interact with your system

Anything done locally that only affects your user is userspace. Doing configuration changes in userspace versus globally will reduce the likelihood of you breaking something. So making changes in ~/.local, for example, instead of /usr/local.