pyssla

Literally never heard of it. Its Discord server has attracted over a thousand members. So I suppose it’s save to assume that it has had a user base.

Nevertheless, from a quick glance at least, it doesn’t seem as if it was doing anything necessarily unique; just bundling a bunch of software on install. So, while I pity for its users, I’m sure they will be served well elsewhere.

I wanted to write a long-ass comment until I remembered the existence of the following excellent guide: https://lemmy.ml/post/18268622 . Please give it a read 😉.

I don’t think I’m an expert on the matter 😅, but I will try my best at an educated guess:

• Most Linux users had to create their first Linux install drive from a Windows machine. As such, they were most likely inclined to use something else instead. Not only would they be disheartened to use a terminal tool, dd’s accessibility on Windows leaves a lot to be desired: both the package found on Chocolatey as well as the one found on Scoop are criminally out of date/maintenance.

  Regardless, after learning how to use another tool instead of dd for creating an install drive, they often fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy and continue to use the other tool OR tools that are most similar to it. Letting dd slide for the foreseeable time…

• dd, while absolutely functional, is relatively bare-bones:

  • it does not download ISOs for you
  • nor does it checksum them to see if you got the right one
  • nor does it give you the functionality to put multiple bootable ISOs to the same drive
  • it comes with no guardrails; as such, destroying your own system isn’t out of the ordinary. I can totally understand why some people would be hesitant to use something as such
  • it only offers a TUI while the vast majority seems to favor a GUI instead

  If someone would like to use a tool that does any of the above in addition to making an install drive, then dd simply falls short and is simply ignored/dismissed in favor of any of the viable alternatives.

2. UNetbootin

I find it hard to recommend a project that hasn’t received any development in over two years.

3. Balena Etcher

Unfortunately, balenaEtcher has allegedly become spyware. (Or there are at least concerns surrounding it.)

4. Ventoy

This used to be my favorite tool for this. However, even after 16 months have gone by and two different issues have been opened to address the same problem, it hasn’t resulted in replacing the (binary) BLOBs by reproducible ones. Hence, security-conscious projects like secureblue have started to recommend against the use of Ventoy for installing their images.

5. Universal USB Installer

6. Yumi

Still going strong over all these years. Though it’s AFAIK the only piece of software that doesn’t host the code on GitHub (or similar platforms), but instead seems to rely on its Contact page for bug and issue reports. FWIW, they do employ Ventoy’s bootloader. Unsure how this relates to the aforementioned concern related to (binary) BLOBs.

7. PowerISO

This ain’t even open source. You can order your copy from here.

9. MultiBootUSB

Hasn’t received any development in over 5 years.

10. ImageUSB Writer

Is this even open source?

This leaves us with:

1. Rufus

Great to leave M$ for Linux. Unfortunately, it’s only distributed as .exe’s. Nor is its maintainer interested to support Linux.

8. GNOME Multiwriter

9. Fedora Media Writer

Ah…, finally, we get to the “by and for Linux”. Though, there are about a dozen or so that the article doesn’t mention.

I switched from a shitty Windows to Garuda. That was working wonderful, until I suddenly couldn’t get it to work no matter what Proton version. Then I switched to Ubuntu, same issue. Then Cachy, then back to Ubuntu, and now back at it again with Garuda.

While I’m in the camp that one shouldn’t distro-hop in hopes of fixing their problems, you seem to be keen on it. And that’s ultimately your prerogative. With that in mind, have you considered trying something based on Fedora instead? Perhaps Bazzite is able to offer you a fix?

Why Kinoite over say uBlue’s Aurora, Bazzite or even uBlue’s base^[1] Kinoite image?

Honestly, we’ve been eating pretty good fam. See https://www.protondb.com/ for game compatibility on Linux.

The only remaining pain points are (see the provided links for databases on what does and doesn’t work):

• Anti-cheat; https://areweanticheatyet.com/
• VR; https://db.vronlinux.org/

during the process I discovered that their kernel parameters were being reset with every kernel update

That’s pretty horrid. They ought to have fixed that since. Right?

Suse

Tumbleweed? Slowroll? Leap? Aeon? Kalpa? Which one?

Based on their post history, I strongly suspect the OP has English as a non-primary language.

While I believe your intent and attempt is noble, in OP’s comment history we find their admittance to being American.

Furthermore, I’d argue their history actually suggests that they’re very much capable of writing perfectly sound English. In fact, this isn’t my first interaction with OP. So I know they can do better. But, for whatever reason, they haven’t demonstrably shown the same diligence when writing up this particular post.

They are doing fine, their posts are perfectly understandable.

The bold part is probably directly targeting the “proofreading your writings before posting them”-part of my original comment. And I’ll admit that I should have done a better job at conveying that this doesn’t intend to allude to a structural problem. So, to be clear, it was meant as general advice after being bothered by (only) this post.

Fam, I loathe saying this, but -please- if you desire engagement, then at least put some honest effort into proofreading your writings before posting them. I’m just assuming stuff at this point because I can barely grasp your intent/writing. *sigh*

Why do atomic distros which are supposed to me more stable, superior to some degree immutable environments lack good backup options? You can hack things together and there are somewhat installable tools. Like timeshift or etc etc.

Which distros even come by default -so installed OOTB- with “good backup options”? Which atomic distros is this statement even based on?

But it seems they place a lot more emphasis on rolling back poor updates in the event than total system backups.

Because their atomicity barely goes beyond updates. The ‘atomic’ in “atomic distros” mostly describes how its updates are atomic; i.e. the system either updates successfully or doesn’t update at all. Thus, by design, we have two possible states after an update: a ‘successfully’ updated system or a ‘failed’ update resulting in the same state as the previous. Atomic distros aren’t smart enough to catch all ‘breakage’ occurred by ‘successful’ updates. As such, most of these breakages will only show them after trying to boot into updated system. Deleting/erasing the previous known good state without verifying that the new/upcoming state works well is foolish. Especially on a distro that’s got robust updates otherwise. Hence, the functionality of rollbacks on updates is almost trivially done/applied to atomic distros, as it (almost) follows by design.

So, what I’m interested in is the following:

• Are you familiar with the notion of stateless systems? Is this (perhaps) what you’re (actually) seeking?

By default it you should have true backups then layer in rollbacks. Not the other way around. Am I missing something?

I think my previous paragraph should be enlightening in this regard. If you disagree (or something/otherwise), then please feel free to elaborate why you think so. Btw, what do you even mean with "true backups?

What distro did this happen on?

How long ago did you install it?

Thank you for the quick response!

I don’t know if raw package counts is the best comparison.

You’re probably right. Do you think we got anything better to go by?

Unlike say Fedora, Arch bundles everything related to a project in the same file. If you want Qt6-base on Arch, that is one package. If you want it on Fedora, it is going to have a lib, header, docs, and maybe a few other packages.

Can’t comment on this. Though, the list of packages with qt6 in their name is considerably longer in Fedora. However, I wonder if this simply reflects that Fedora, by virtue of having a larger repository, also has more stuff related to qt6. Or, as you posited it, chooses to package the same content over multiple packages instead of bundling them like it’s supposedly happening on Arch.

Just from personal experience, I do not have issues with finding packages in the main repos, with only a handful of my packages coming from the AUR. This is not the case with others, like Fedora where extra repos need to be added, like EPEL and RPM Fusion.

Hmm…, I feel you might be conflating stuff. Please allow me to elaborate on what I mean.

Fedora is not able to include some packages in its own repository due to legal reasons. As such, these are relayed to RPM Fusion instead. Which means that a well-functioning Fedora installation (almost necessarily) desires to install some packages from RPM Fusion. So, RPM Fusion exists as a ‘hack’ of sorts to protect Fedora from legal charges and NOT because they’re too lazy (or something) to ship those packages themselves. To be clear, RPM Fusion is accepted as a trusted third-party repository.

Arch, on the other hand, is rather lenient on what they can include in their repositories. Basically enabling them to package within their repositories all codecs and whatnot without them being visibly worried about the legal consequences of this ordeal.

To be honest, I don’t know exactly where this discrepancy comes from. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to how Arch is basically a genuine community distro while Fedora has official ties to Red Hat.

Btw, small correction, AFAIK you’re not supposed to install packages from the EPEL on Fedora. Perhaps you meant COPR (basically Fedora’s AUR) or Terra instead?

The arch maintainers package more software than most other distributions.

Sorry, but I fail to see this.

I suppose if you’re accounting literally all independent distros, then you’re probably right. However, if we’d be more realistic and compare it to other well-established independent distros^[1], then we notice that the vastness of the packages found in Arch’s repository is rather lackluster at the very least. Heck, by virtually all metrics, Arch together with its derivatives undoubtedly belong in the upper echelons of usage stats; only being second to the Debian-family of distros. IMO, however, the size of its repository absolutely doesn’t reflect this; as it’s only bigger than Slackware, Solus and Void. The inclusion of these smaller projects is arguably charitable on my side*. But to drive the point home very clearly: Arch’s repository is smaller than Alpine’s, Debian’s, Fedora’s, openSUSE’s and Gentoo’s with a ratio of (about) two to one (except for openSUSE).

Because, and I quote:

“Warning: AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.”

Thankfully, there’s a mailing list that covers issues like these. Heck, OP’s PSA was probably originally propagated from there.

I use secureblue, because it offers the (AFAIK unique) intersection between:

• a security-first^[1] approach while being fit for general computing
• a first-class citizen of the ‘immutable’ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm
• a well-maintained project with many active contributors that exhibit a proactive stance when it comes to implementing (security) improvements

Idk about the browser thing it was because the kde wallet or something? It stores passwords and the browser has a login so it would force me to do that every time. Same with email and such, very annoying. I think I have it all working fine now.

Ah okay, thanks for the clarification! I have heard of that interaction elsewhere. Unsure if it’s KDE Plasma misbehaving or otherwise. Regardless, I’m glad to hear that you were able to resolve the issue. I did find this discussion (which you may have found yourself as well). In their case, they (somehow) didn’t properly create an account, which opens multiple can of worms you’d much rather not deal with. Thankfully, the fact that you were able to deal with the problem suggests that you should be fine 😉.

Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.

On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:

• care-free updates
• repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
• rewards effort put into initial setup

Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.

Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.

If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix^[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.

Thanks for reporting back!

Pretty good so far

Glad to hear that it has been a pleasant experience overall!

few things took a while to figure out …

The “force me to enter a password any time I open my browser”-thing seems like unintended behavior. Pretty strange. Glad to hear that it has been resolved, though.

sadly still one thing I probably won’t ever be able to fix is getting a program (combat mode for GW2) to actually work as it’s… like 13 years old and just lets me press a button to make my mouse left/right click into keys while the game is up. They have integrated the other functionality of it at least so it’s not THAT bad. Might be able to get my mouse to manually do that if I check out the drivers for it I think someone made.

Perhaps you’ve already undertaken what I’m about to say, so please feel free to ignore this if that’s the case: Have you reached out to their Discord server in hopes of resolving the issue? While their documentation is pretty great, it’s possible that it ain’t sufficient. Whenever that happens, the Discord community can (and probably will (at least in my experience)) step up and provide excellent guidance when prompted.

Honestly, Bazzite seems to fit like a glove:

• RTX 3070Ti

Nvidia can be an ass to work with on a lot of distros, but Bazzite delivers the right drivers OOTB.

Needs:

• Gaming

Bazzite is setup for gaming OOTB; it’s bundled with Steam and Lutris, makes use of custom kernels/schedulers to optimize performance for gaming and contains many other goodies like excellent controller/peripheral support.

• Coding (Mostly python)

Provides a specialized DX (i.e. Developer Experience) image that comes with all the goodies you might expect.

• Video editing

Has a built-in just script that downloads, installs and sets up Davinci Resolve for ya: ujust install-resolve

• Music composing

This is the only I’m not 100% sure yet because you haven’t provided explicitly yet what you’d like to use. But, I can’t image it would be harder to get this running on Bazzite compared to other distros.

And last, but not least:

I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance

Through utilizing the bootc model, Bazzite is as low maintenance as they come.