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(Read this in capslock) How did you get the Xbox controller firmware to work?

Seriously! I tried it for a whole afternoon, before I gave up and just bought a generic gamepad. This was the last time I bought a Microsoft hardware thing. Fuck u MS!

Out of curiosity, what are the benefits of using say bluefin over just plain fedora?

Let’s say we compare regular Fedora (Workstation) or KDE spin with Vanilla Silverblue or Kinoite (Atomic).

Fedora Atomic is the newest generation of Linux, as some people call it.

It is a bit similar to how Android works. Basically, the core operating system is “locked up”, and everything you do is done as normal user, including app installations.
Therefore, you have a “you” section, with all Flatpak apps and cat videos, and a “OS” part, which you don’t have to care about.

Of course this is still Linux, and you have full sudo permissions and can still install all software on the host system, e.g. Nvidia drivers. Upstream Fedora Atomic is good, but has some minor flaws, like users having to install said Nvidia drivers or codecs manually.

uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin, etc.) basically take the upstream image and rebuild it with a lot of tweaks and optimizations, like having codecs (e.g. for watching videos) already included. They especially try to make everything as user friendly as possible and provide a “just works” distro.

As I said, it’s a bit similar to how you use Android: you don’t use Android, it’s only a platform for you to launch your apps. You don’t worry about codecs, updates gone wrong, or whatever. You just use it and don’t think about it. And that’s the mission. Building an extremely robust and simple OS.

I should also add that I prefer a long term support installation because I don’t reinstall very often.

You’ll never have to reinstall anything. If an update comes out, either a big release or just bug fixes, they get installed in the background and then applied onto the next boot without any interference. You don’t notice it.

And if you really want to switch to another variant, e.g. when the new Cosmic DE comes out, you can do it with just one command. With that, the “you” section is kept, and the “OS part” is swapped out.

And if you worry about being too bleeding edge, you can choose the ´gts´ variant of Bluefin, which is a more conservative branch with less surprises.

I can wholeheartly recommend you either Bazzite or Aurora / Bluefin.

All three are pretty much the exact same under the hood (Fedora Atomic). They are from the uBlue-Project and focus A LOT on user friendliness, hardware enablement and a “boring” (just works) experience.

Bazzite is more meant for gaming, and Aurora and Bluefin are more for general use, but you can of course use them totally interchangeably. You can even try out one, and if you don’t like it as much, you can rebase to another variant with just one command.

The cool thing about them is that the Nvidia drivers are already baked into the image if you choose the Nvidia option on the download page.

This means, that you probably won’t encounter any breakages, and even if you do, you don’t have to fix them on your own. If your setup breaks, every one else’s will break too, because the non-user-facing part of the OS is the same everywhere, and the devs will fix it very rapidly. In the meantime, you can just select the image from yesterday, where everything still worked, and continue with your stuff for the next few hours :)

I’ve never encountered such a chill distro in my Linux journey yet!