Probably we don’t need new Thinkpads. And the old either. The main motivation behind the desire of people to by old Thinkpads is a desire to be a part of the club and culture, to look like a hacker, a geek. The same motivation had early apple fanboys. I hope smarter people will become less dependent from such crowdthinking phenomena not more.

WhatsApp is the most popular messenger in Russia, not Telegram.

I’ve tried it and share my few thoughts:

First of all, the first time I’ve tried Smithay-based compositor and it is usable and even supports nvidia. It is a good thing just by itself.

The whole DE is better than I assumed. It in not much polished, but it is good as an experimental thing. I’ve noticed few developer’s creative attempts as “compacted” menubars and dialog pop-ups. I doubt they are good but reveal author’s intent to try create something new.

What I like: The application menu is nice, it also is quite modern: uses Wayland, CSD, Rust and implements modern UX.

What I not so like: UX has some weak parts: unnecessarily duplicated elements between the dock and the top panel. Icon style and preferences is not that good also. I really would like to see icon consistency across the DE which would not harm third-party apps. I also think the project need a designer in the team.

For now there are only few “native” apps. And I would prefer COSMIC will embrace existing GNU/Linux ecosystem and apps without trying to rewrite everything and creating yet another segregated platform as GNOME and KDE do.

I think ChomeOS is good by itself. At least it could be as a properly modified fork. The graphic shell is decent and resource-efficient. It has all things needed for using apps conveniently in VMs, e.g. crosvm, transparent proxying of wayland apps into the host system and file access with 9P. So it keeps the base system clean and secure, because all the user apps are isolated either with a browser sandbox or with a VM. I only want it would be less online-oriented, so I would like to see an offline-first fork of it, degoogled (like some Android customs), and allowing to use more then one linux app VMs.

So, I think ChromeOS is undervaluated by the FLOSS/hacker community and it has very few forks, but the majority of Linux users are focused on more traditional GNU/Linux distros and environments anyway. But with the rise of popularity of immutables, maybe it can get more attention.

Also, it is a perfect environment for PWAs.

I doubt Firefox will deprecate third-party cookies is Chrome won’t. And now Firefox has included literally ad tracking component into the browser and enabled it for all users by default.

Green Hat

NixOS not the major inspiration for immutables, consumer OSes like Android and ChromeOS are. But yes, NixOS has some influence even it don’t get the idea of immutable distros well.

Seems that you cannot access flathub.org for some reasons, a networking issue probably.

Fedora is Fedora and uBlue is uBlue, a separate project. Blaming Fedora for uBlue issues is like blaming Ubuntu for Mint issues.

And on Silverblue issues on updated happen from time to time. On immutable distros such issues won’t break the system unrecoverable, this is the whole reason for immutables, but there are no promises for lacking of issues.

And you are disappointed because you have encountered two different issues at once. But it is a purely random event, and I have not noticed any changes in frequency.

But saying about Silverblue, I think probably it doesn’t get much attention from the Fedora project lately, because few recent releases didn’t have any improvements either.

Fedora Silverblue, but OK, well, maybe openSUSE Aeon also.

GNOME

Better not having different regions at all.

I will use it. I don’t care what others think. People can use su, sudo, doas, run0 by their choice, and I don’t see why we need a common opinion about it.

Maybe they are new users who miss Windows, so they are trying to find reasoning to stay on Linux. I as an old user have no more any special emotions about Windows. I play with it form time to time. But the OS is quite conservative because of its market monopoly and I don’t find anything new and interesting in new releases. It is not special about Windows, all consumer OSes are kinda stabilized now, and corporations do not want to experimenting and build new things.

So, I don’t hate Windows, I just don’t find it interesting for me. I use and will use it on a separate machine for some niche tasks, when they require windows-only software.

Btrfs snapshots are already used in openSUSE microOS which is branded as immutable. And AshOS generalizes it for any kind of distro: https://github.com/ashos/ashos . I think it is nice middle-ground for regular distros, which does them more reliable.

But for me, immutables are more about separation between the base system and the apps, where the base is not only immutable, but image-based: ostree, A/B partitions, systemd-sysupdate. And the apps are distro-independent: flatpak, containers, and so on. So apps are upgraded independently from the system, and one doesn’t need to upgrade the system just to have apps updated or vice versa. Btrfs snapshots doesn’t solve anything here by itself.

It is quite opinionated though.

Oh, I see also by their screenshots, that Bluefin also spoils the UX of GNOME with custom extensions. So I will consider it the Manjaro (or Mint) of immutable distros.

Silverblue is an official Fedora edition, almost exact Fedora Workstation, but immutable. I use it. universal blue is a third-party project and their images are bloated with additional “features”: packages, drivers, etc. Bluefin contains Homebrew for example. It’s how they describe it, but I haven’t tried it to say more precise.

At least it is not a cheap copy of Windows.

It is comparatively to Debian/Ubuntu derivatives. Even Arch and NixOS probably have more users now. Lately I see some popularity of uBlue derivatives among new users, but I don’t know how many people use it, and where the popularity comes from.