marcie

Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now

Generated via ublue's countme script https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg

Here is Fedora's upstream graph to compare:

Now we have the immutable Exodia, VanillaOS for Debian, KDE Linux for Arch, Bazzite/Fedora Atomic for Fedora, NixOS for NixOS. What's great about this is KDE is zeroed in on developing for immutable distros now and will make their apps work better with them, this will help the whole ecosystem.

News article: https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-release-of-kde-linux/

Just what the world needs, another Linux distro…

A sentiment I have in the past expressed myself.

However, there’s a method to our madness. KDE is a huge producer of software. It’s awkward for us to not have our own method of distributing it. Yes, KDE produces source code that others distribute, but we self-distribute our apps on app stores like Flathub and the Snap and Microsoft stores, so I think it’s natural thing for us to have our own platform for doing that distribution too, and that’s an operating system. I think all the major producers of free software desktop environments should have their own OS, and many already do: Linux Mint and ElementaryOS spring to mind, and GNOME is working on one too.

Besides, this matter was settled 10 years ago with the creation of KDE neon, our first bite at the “in-house OS” apple. The sky did not fall; everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Speaking of KDE neon, what’s going on with it? Is it canceled? If not, doesn’t this amount to unnecessary duplication?

KDE neon is not canceled. However it has shed most of its developers over the years, which is problematic, and it’s currently being held together by a heroic volunteer. KDE e.V. has been reaching out to stakeholders to see if we can help put in place a continuity or transition plan. No decision has yet been made about its future.

While neon continues to exist, KDE Linux therefore does represent duplication. As for unnecessary? That I’m less sure about that. Harald, myself, and others feel that KDE neon has somewhat reached its limit in terms of what we can do with it. It was a great first product for KDE to distribute our own software and prepare the world for the idea of KDE in that role, and it served admirably for a decade. But technological and conceptual issues limit how far we can continue to develop it.

Generated via https://github.com/ublue-os/countme

10k added users since last post. Here are upstream Fedora numbers only

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'm sorry I thought the headline was funny

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?

I took a lot of shortcuts because I am slowly moving away from photoshop/illustrator to open source alternatives like Krita and Gimp. Its kind of a struggle, but I'm hoping with enough practice I'll be as good as I was in P$ in no time! Biggest issue is getting used to the sketching, pressure, and color tools, the colors are kinda all over the place and I'm finding it hard to equalize them.

I kinda hated how I had to spool up a vm to get into photoshop all the time on linux. No longer!

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/