I did read everything and I appreciate your writing!

Thank you so much! I appreciate it 😊!

I might give Fedora another try at some point

It’s a big honour that you’re even reconsidering your stance on Fedora. Thank you! But, honestly 😜, I wasn’t interested in proselytizing Fedora or anything. I wanted to better understand your stance and perhaps^[1] learn something in the process.

I’m a happy man.

I’m glad to hear you are 😊. Have (another) good one, fam!

This became a lot longer of a writing than I expected. My apologies*. So, without further ado.

I got confused with CentOS changes in 2000: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

It eroded my trust with anything Red Hat-related. And the acquisition by IBM in 2019 had already damaged its image.

Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying! I remember that the pushback was real on that one. But, I’m not sure if it was justified. If anything, I’d say that people had a knee-jerk reaction to it and it soon after became a ‘toxic’ environment in which reasonable discourse was (almost) non-existent.

However, Gordon Messmer^[1]’s piece on this suggests that CentOS was everything but what was idealized by the community. As such, being converted to CentOS Stream might have been a positive change.

Anyhow, honestly, I’m not well-versed with RHEL(-clones). So feel free to dismiss anything I’ve said 😜.

Moving on… What’s perhaps important to note is that Fedora’s relation to Red Hat is a curious one. For example, Fedora defaults to Btrfs for its file system while Red Hat has deprecated it for quite a while now. Furthermore, while Red Hat seems to go pretty hard on Image Mode, Fedora didn’t even block a major update (until very recently) if some bug impacted its atomic variants very negatively. So, basically, Red Hat’s priorities =/= Fedora’s priorities.

But, having said all of that, I do respect your choice to not trust anything Red Hat-related. Perhaps, I would have done so as well, were it not for the fact that I’ve been daily driving Fedora(-derivatives) for quite a while. Yes, I admit that I’m probably biased 😅.

Last time I tried Fedora (around last year), anything installed via the “software” app in GNOME defaulted to a flatpak install.

Interesting. I literally did a fresh Fedora install within a VM and the results have been interesting:

• If it catches (!) that the package is available within any non-flatpak repository, then it will prefer the .rpm install by default. Examples include Steam and GNOME builder.
• However, if for some strange reason the .rpm package is not picked up, then it does default to flatpak. And it’s not possible to select the .rpm package within the GUI either. Even though sudo dnf install <package name> does work as you’d expect 😅. Examples include Neovim.

I wonder if you had to deal with the above shenanigans last year as well. Or, perhaps, it was even worse for some awful reason. Anyhow, there’s more truth to it than I expected. Though, I’d argue it’s probably some bug or otherwise unintended behavior.

If you’ve read all of my ramblings, then I’d like to thank you for the effort 😊! Have a good one, fam!

Definitely. Though, for completeness’ sake, both rpm-ostree and (even) ostree offered something similar:

• rpm-ostree usroverlay for the former
• ostree admin unlock for the latter

Though, I don’t know if RakuOS’ hacking could leverage either one of the above for the persistent overlay…

Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer:

I may have misunderstood the announcement 5 years ago

I didn’t reference any 5 year old announcement. If you didn’t imply that anyways, then please consider sharing the 5 year old announcement.

Are they still defaulting to flatpak for new apps?

Did Fedora ever default to flatpak for new apps 🤔? For Fedora Atomic, sure. But I don’t recall traditional Fedora ever doing so. This isn’t Canonical that re-installs an .deb installation as a snap.

I suppose it’s pretty easy to see why when you consider what the most^[1] popular plugins are for the popular shell zsh:

• zsh-autosuggestions
• zsh-syntax-highlighting

Both of which literally start by referencing fish in their respective READMEs.

And where zsh requires plugins to get these, fish has these by default. Perhaps unsurprising as fish stands for Friendly Interactive SHell. As such, the niceties don’t stop there.

Basically, if you want a no-nonsense shell that gets pretty much out of your way and comes with excellent defaults right of the gate, then you simply can’t go wrong with fish.

Take this from someone that stubbornly tried to bend bash to my will with stuff like ble.sh (link) and later zsh with zsh-quickstart-kit, but to no avail… It always caused more trouble than it was worth. And when I finally gave in and tried fish, it was pure bliss from the get-go. The rest has been history… Fish has literally become the first thing I install on all my systems.

Note, however, that (as per fish’ documentation) you shouldn’t change your login shell to fish. This blogpost by a CoreOS engineer goes over it in more length.

Excellent insight, thank you (once again)!

While not much, this is the kind of endorsement I wanted out of this. Even though I was being deliberately horrid at communicating that 😜.

Hehe, that’s very close to my reaction when I first heard about it 😜. I wasn’t able to find any of the technical details either, so I approached them through one of their community channels and they’ve been very patient and helpful. So, IIUC, they leverage bootc usr-overlay. But where bootc usr-overlay is transient, thus making anything installed through dnf go away on every reboot. RakuOS has somehow hacked their way to make it persistent instead. For more details, I’d suggest making contact with them. Perhaps you can retrofit their solution to your own system 😉.

Ah, okay. I do concede that -historically- Fedora wasn’t robust, no. They weren’t shy about breaking changes, which even led them to be referred to as Red Hat’s test bed distro by the community and beyond.

However, for (at least) the last 5 years or so, Fedora’s direction has changed significantly. I’m not entirely sure what prompted this change, but it has definitely been a welcome one. For example: most recently, Fedora has somewhat even formalized this new approach with their new initiative.

Basically, Fedora wants to be innovative like they’ve always been known for. But, this shouldn’t come at the cost of alienating your own user base. Thus, the proposal details how these two perspectives can see eye to eye with each other.

As for KDE Plasma; again -historically- it has been a second-class citizen on Fedora; at least, compared to GNOME. But, KDE Plasma has since been promoted. There’s no meaningful difference between the two variants when it comes to how Fedora regards them. Even the website alludes to this:

Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.

Why do you think that?

Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro)

If you mean that they’re more stable, then I simply have to assume that you think those are more robust than Fedora (because the other interpretation^[1] wouldn’t make any sense). Which (again) begs the question… why do you think that?

like how fedora atomic desktop is to ublue

Great analogy! Even though I’m pretty caught up with the whole bootc shebang, I didn’t make that connection between Guix and rde. Thank you!

Alright, that was quite illuminating. I suppose I was definitely not grasping the full extent of the extensibility found on Guix. And, perhaps more importantly, how it’s a defining feature of Guix. Thank you; I appreciate it.

Perhaps I’m being too romantic, but just like how rde users were the first to catch a glimpse of guix home, so too it feels that today’s rde users are catching a glimpse of features that will eventually land on Guix proper.

Alright, that has been a bit more elucidating. Thank you!

I’m literally a newb to Guix, so please forgive me for my ignorance.

But while using (parts of) rde by regarding it as a channel is found within its documentation, I don’t think it’s the full picture. Like, rde is also a distro, at least by the admission of its creator. The same can not be said about nonguix. So, to be frank, I don’t think it’s just another Guix channel.

Having said that, I am still very new to all of this. So, if I’m incorrect and/or my understanding is lacking, then please feel free to correct/educate me on this.

While I think hearing about the sequence is cool as well, I was actually more interested in the (in)direct motivation behind it. Like, how did Arch Linux (specifically) manage to pique your interest?