Linux

Which one(s)

Unsure if distrohopping the dualboot counts, but if it does, then the following was my path (note that after Fedora Silverblue was installed, it remained on the system; the two distros in between the two Silverblues were dualboots):

Fedora Kinoite -> Fedora Silverblue -> EndeavourOS -> Nobara -> Fedora Silverblue

why?

I started with Fedora Kinoite after spending 1-2 weeks on gathering information on distros. During the research-phase, I learned what distros are, their components, how to analyze the differences between distros, which components are ultimately more beneficial for me and thus slowly but surely the distro that would suit me best started to take shape.

My switch to Linux was on the basis of privacy concerns and Windows 10's mishaps on my laptop were what pulled the trigger, which in retrospect were probably caused by hardware faults. Regardless, as privacy was my main concern, security became paramount; as there's no privacy as long as access to your data is not secured off. Therefore Qubes OS, while not necessarily a Linux distro, would have been my first choice. But, unfortunately, my system wasn't capable of running it.

Therefore, I had to settle with something else. As my endgame is Qubes OS, I wasn't very interested in getting into the nitty gritty of Linux for the virtue of hardening it. Instead, I opted to rely on a distro that would do the heavy lifting for me. Such a distro wouldn't only have to be known for taking security very seriously, they also required an excellent track record. As such, I landed on Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE. Other projects that are known to take security seriously like Whonix and Tails aren't suited for general use. Furthermore, they're ideally used in conjunction with another system; Whonix as a VM and Tails accessed on a USB-stick whenever you require an amnesic operating system.

Choosing between Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE was hard based on these criteria only. The third and final criteria to seal the deal was atomicity. Like I mentioned earlier, my laptop had issues; it could randomly turn off. So I needed a robust system that could handle such disturbances and not die in the process. This is where the aforementioned atomicity comes into play, this ensures that the system either updates or not; no in-between messed up state due to a power outage or whatsoever. At the time, only Fedora had a somewhat mature system capable of atomic upgrades; namely Kinoite and Silverblue. The differences between these two were about their respective desktop environments. I hadn't experienced either of the two previously, but went initially for Kinoite for how KDE Plasma reminded me more of what I was already used to (i.e. Windows).

Fedora Kinoite came with its sets of troubles. It was still a relatively young project; it was the first release in which it was officially supported. As I knew how easy Fedora's Atomic distros made switching from one base to another, I just rebased to Fedora Silverblue with the rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/35/x86_64/silverblue command and went on with my life 😜.

After this came the honeymoon-phase and I was really positively surprised by how well everything was going. From all the things I had done for the sake of privacy, switching to Linux was (and still is) my favorite. But as I was ever expanding my Linux workflow to include everything I did on Windows, I happened to reach a (seemingly) insurmountable obstacle; Davinci Resolve. No matter what I did on Fedora Silverblue, it was always functioning less performant compared to Windows; which in retrospect seems to be related to the fact that Davinci Resolve requires a dedicated GPU on Linux (though some workarounds do exist). In hopes of resolving this issue, I tried to install Arch as a dualboot. As this was pre archinstall, this was a miserable experience. And after a few tries, I still wasn't content with what I got and instead opted to install EndeavourOS.

EndeavourOS was pretty cool. I already liked what I saw from Arch within Distrobox and EndeavourOS was able to deliver an excellent experience (at least initially). Davinci Resolve worked better here than it did in Fedora Silverblue. And it was overall a pretty snappy experience, so I returned to it occasionally for other things (like gaming) as well. Until..., one day..., it just stopped working 🤣. Perhaps I could have done a better job by installing Snapper/Timeshift, but I didn't and didn't care enough for it to reinstall...

Of course, the departure of EndeavourOS did leave behind a void, so eventually I tried Nobara as I believed it might be capable to provide a similar experience. And I did like it, though not to the degree of EndeavourOS. Eventually this one also passed out 🤣.

Currently, I've just dismissed the idea to run Davinci Resolve on Linux and I'm more happy ever since 😜. For better performance during gaming, I've since been resorting to bazzite-arch and Conty. While performance shouldn't be as good as native CachyOS or other highly optimized gaming distributions, it's more than fine as is and the sub 5% performance/fps I'm missing out on is not worth for how much more convenient my current setup is.

FWIW, I do see myself utilizing Gentoo and NixOS in their designated qubes whenever the switch to Qubes OS occurs. But until then, I'm making the best out of Fedora Silverblue.