My path to uBlue

General
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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 However, Kubuntu always lags behind on KDE releases - they are often out of date on the release of the Ubuntu version, and if you use an LTS it’s even worse.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.

10 Likes
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I also learned about Bluefin from Late Night Linux. I did just switch over to Aurora, for some Plamsa action, but I really like the container-first patterns in the ublue family.

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I found uBlue through my time using Fedora KDE, later on Kinoite, as can be read in my profile.
I am very happy I did transfer to Aurora, especially for 1 thing: Nvidia driver. No idea what is done differently here compared to Fedora, but now I can watch Youtube video’s. On Fedora I could also watch them but they were very choppy, stuttering when I used the Nvidia driver. With my AMD driver it was smooth, but then the whole system was not stable, forcing me to install the Nvidia driver. I used the best method possible: using the RPM-Fusion repo. Driver was layered on Kinoite, while in Aurora it is part of the base system. Maybe that is the reason it is so much better here.
Now, from day 1, a few weeks ago, video’s are great to watch, I enjoy them very much.
I hope this wil stay my daily driver for many years to come.