Early Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy tied to Open Source Software.
It's been fun watching Ubuntu evolve over the years and see distros like Mint evolve off of them as well.
Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time.
I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.
I use a combination of toolbox, distrobox, flatpak, docker, homebrew, junest and custom bwrap scripts.
For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.
The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...
Would I use it for a mission critical workstation or server? Probably not. But for daily personal use, it's been completely fine for me and I would highly recommend it to others.
Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.
I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience with how that "half" lives, but: this is one of the things that's so nice about MacOS + Homebrew. It's a very stable core (up through and including the graphical environment—after all, if that breaks on a workstation/desktop, that's nearly as bad as the whole OS breaking) that only updates every couple years (and I can ignore the updates a long time without notable consequences) with a very-high-package-count package manager that's rolling-release on top of it, for most of the software I directly use.
I'd love to see a Linux distro that worked that way—I don't think I could go back to doing package management the typical Linux way, on my workstation. I've done rolling-release, I've done everything-stable-and-maybe-some-bodged-in-extra-repositories-for-newer-stuff, and both suck, for my needs, compared to this arrangement. Stable core + rolling applications is great, would be thrilled to see more Linux distros explore that kind of thing.
Immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue seem to lean in that direction, though I've never used them personally.
Editing a file in /etc/ feels like PEEK/POKEing to memory now. Barbaric.
It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you.
Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons).
I’m just stating the obvious here, really.
There's my personal anecdote.
Exactly: my productive environment is «out of the browser» and I want it to be as fitting as possible, for my efficiency and comfort.
Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.
Different strokes and all that.
I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.
There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.
Others might too, those are the only two I have experience with though.