Just a user story:
So I started using Linux with Ubuntu, which was great. This must have been around the 8.04 days, and I used Ubuntu for many years. I decided at some point to try other DE’s, and really liked KDE. However, Kubuntu always lags behind on KDE releases - they are often out of date on the release of the Ubuntu version, and if you use an LTS it’s even worse.
A few years ago I found KDE Neon, and started using that. Neon is great, and was working well for me, but in the last few months I ran into issues with screen capture breaking. This turned out to be the fact that Neon is running on 22.04, but needs a newer version of pipewire to capture the desktop, so they did a backport of a newer pipewire. However, this version broke screen capture for some reason.
At this point I realised I should probably use a distro that is rolling or close to that model if I wanted up-to-date KDE stuff. I knew Fedora was quick to update, and had played a little with Silverblue in the past. When I tried Silverblue it was a pretty new project, and I hated it, because I couldn’t get hardly anything working.
However, now we are a few years down the track, and Flatpak has matured and got a lot of apps. So, I decided to try another atomic desktop, after hearing @j0rge talk about them on one of the Late Night Linux podcasts. I decided to try Bazzite as I didn’t want to have to deal with getting media codecs and stuff sorted out on vanilla Silverblue, and I do a little gaming.
Bazzite has been great so far, and I’ve actually been really enjoying the atomic mode of updates. The only app I have to layer is Zerotier, everything else I’ve needed has been in Flatpak or Homebrew. I’m now running Bazzite on my desktop and laptop, and Aurora on my media PC, and it’s all working well.
So thanks to the uBlue team for the great projects. I think these atomic desktops may be a good future for the majority of users, especially because of the bulletproof updates and seperation of apps and the OS image.