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.
Sounds like a good way to do Linux phones.
This is the least of the issues that Linux phones are facing though. It’s mostly the drivers that are lacking. Linux phones are also one of the areas where you actually don’t want flatpak and docker bloating up your system with duplicated dependencies because you have limited storage.
An image-based system would be the bare minimum to achieve basic security, but there would still be so many security issues compared to Android and iOS, that I don’t think Linux phones are worth putting time and development effort into.
AOSP is a fantastic base for open source mobile systems. The FOSS mobile development community should rather shift its focus to AOSP, develop a good understanding of it and get familiar with the code, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with mobile Linux distros.
The vast majority of the FOSS mobile development community has already shifted to AOSP. “Proper” mobile Linux has never been a serious thing except maybe during the Nokia N900 era (It was released in 2009.). So I don’t really get what you’re trying to say with that statement. Also the main thing that’s lacking for mobile Linux are the drivers and hardware*, so there it does not really matter whether it’s Linux “proper” or Android because the low level stuff is pretty much the same.
*With hardware I mean that the devices are not designed to be tinkered with unless it’s Pinephone like Linux phone, where the problem are said drivers.
I’m talking about developments such as postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch/UBports, Phosh (mobile GNOME), Plasma Mobile, etc.
I see so many people here on Lemmy who are desperately waiting for Linux phones to replace their iPhones or Android phones, without realizing that idea is absolutely utopian and unrealistic.
We really cannot rely on aosp because while google in control of source code and not take any contribution to code we have in relastic case "u permitted to read code and clone " and back feedback and as result we will have aosp as google wish it only for their own profits and theirs views how they see it.I am not even talking that they not use any enforce policy that manufactures cannot lock bootloader without ability to unlock
Honestly, I haven’t considered this before but it sounds like a great idea.