marcie

bazzite seems to be so crucial for widespread adoption, watching with great interest!

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:

• I can rebase to Bazzite for gaming performance when I feel like having a long gaming session.

• I can rebase to Secureblue when I think I will not be gaming and would prefer a more secure linux setup.

• 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.

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

So, first off, to make it for daily browsing use I did some basic alterations to the browser by allowing it to keep history, caches, cookies, disabling always-on incognito, and so on. I also installed my favorite addons (Dark Reader, Sponsorblock, I try to be as minimalistic in my choices as possible). This of course harms the privacy, but you can just ctrl+shift+p to basically turn all of that shit off when you decide you need to get serious. I kept the letterboxing on, its hard to get used to initially but after about a month of using Mullvad as a daily driver I got used to it. It seems most sites aren't able to detect my alterations to the browser.

I don't think any other privacy browser spin (Librewolf, Waterfox, Brave, Tor Browser etc) comes anywhere close to the snappiness and privacy intersection of Mullvad Browser. I'm able to skirt bans due to using anonymity services trivially and the captchas are short and quick and not a never-ending slug fest. Its good enough at faking a unique identity out of the box that most things cannot tell that its fake. I'm in such love that I'm going to swap away from my current vpn (IVPN, sub should end in November) to Mullvad due to how well polished this project is. I'm really interested if their multihop service can get around VPN IP bans better than Tor can.

Kudos to the Mullvad team 🥂 I hope you make an android version soon!

I will be stuck in low or no internet areas and having a way to save a whole website (such as a small community wiki or something) to browse while bored would be very nice. It'd be nice if its features like search could be kept working. Any suggestions for a Foss app that can do this?

So many people seem to recommend this app, but its obviously not open source and requires an email to signup, which seems unnecessary. Are there any good open source alternatives that are a one-stop-shop of sorts rather than a bunch of mottled scripts?

https://redact.dev/

Lately I've been suggesting Mint or PopOS for laymans looking to swap to linux, but do any of you know of any good gaming distros with a driver manager GUI built in ala Mint?

I've tested most gaming distros with latest (nvidia) hardware and they do not run most major titles out of the box due to driver issues. If there were a gui for driver rollbacks while having great general performance, I could see it beating out Mint/PopOS for my recommendation. Being able to install .deb files is quite nice for laymans too, though I don't know of any other deb based OSes that run well out of the box.

Privacy benefits aside, does qubes run better than a typical vm like virtualbox? I tend to fiddle with distros a lot and I feel qubes might be a good choice, though I'm wondering about how efficient it is

I'm looking for ones that ideally don't log IP. Is there a guide somewhere that looks into each of these instances and whether or not they fulfill the privacy promise?

I'm most interested in Invidious.

I want to ungoogle myself as much as possible, but I've found that Google Maps is by far the best dataset for maps. I can search 'fast food' and it'll pull up anything related to that near me. I've tried things like OrganicMaps, and while it is blazing fast and very private in comparison to Google Maps, it unfortunately does not have the best information.

Are there any apps that are kind of like a proxy/nitter like frontend for Google Maps and it respects privacy? Are there any ways to just straight up rip data from Google Maps and pull it into another app?