PackageKit

Bad to whom?

At least it is not a cheap copy of Windows.

Oh, but so many people in the world identify themselves as religious. Why they do not want to see an artificial God?

I wish to live in a world where the media doesn’t consist of articles about how some rich or famous person says or thinks something.

It is comparatively to Debian/Ubuntu derivatives. Even Arch and NixOS probably have more users now. Lately I see some popularity of uBlue derivatives among new users, but I don’t know how many people use it, and where the popularity comes from.

Because Mint is popular among the crowd, and such challenges are also driven by the crowd. Better to see it as some social or meme dynamics, than to explain it with logical reasons. I also see more new users who use arch, because of the “I use arch BTW” meme.

As a Fedora Silverblue user I find it hard to recommend it to new users. It’s not an issue with Fedora, but with the state of Linux desktop in general. At least with Mint/Ubuntu people can rely on social media and the community if they have problems. And Fedora is a more niche thing, and doesn’t have a big crowd.

Moreover, I chose Fedora because of my experience, which allows me to have opinion what is better. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to explain the years of the Linux desktop drama to new users, when they are just doing the first steps or trying to feed their curiosity.

I’m not sure if your issues are related to the distro(s) used and not to the hardware. But if you wish immutable distros…

You can try to use Ubuntu, but installing all the apps as snaps (and/or flatpaks). That will give you immutable-like experience on a regular Ubuntu installation. Otherwise, I’d recommend to try Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon.

Not true about Rawhide. It’s a testing environment for maintainers and developers. And it often has many outdated packages.

Probably, because of the background image.

Oh, these long-awaited arm laptops are designed for high TDP and have active cooling. I don’t see why to choose them over Intel/AMD in that case.

a “bug”

Hopefully, never.

Oh, finally!

systemd now is focused around image-based systems. There is a huge gap between this design and traditional distros. I hate how the linux community has nothing in between of these two polar opposite approaches.

I’ve tried to use Fedora Workstation in VM (GNOME Boxes) with only 1GiB RAM. And it is even usable and UI is responsible for GNOME and Firefox, but applications start more slowly. All those at cost of higher CPU usage. Probably it performs well because Fedora uses swap on ZRam, and it makes the system more reliable.

Distros are unnecessary entities and don’t improve anything here. What is needed it’s separation of the system and the apps, where apps are provided in sandboxed bundles with permissions. It will solve a lot of issues, not only one you have mentioned. And try to imagine amount of years needed for understanding or explaining importance of this to the GNU/Linux community. A viable desktop OS, huh?

Society will suffer anyway. It doesn’t make solutions magically appear. You only said why you want it, but not how to do it. To transform GNU/Linux distros into a viable desktop OS is not an easy task, especially when people don’t have a consensus about what it should be.

“Desktop” Linux exists in this state for decades. Who cares? Maybe we won’t have consumer desktops as a niche soon. Existing users are fine with that. Don’t say you are waiting that Linux will become “a viable desktop OS alternative” in next few years.

It’s also not about “desktop and sever variants”. Desktop Linux is either conservative or underresourced. Conservatives will told you that you are wrong and there is no issue. And they are major Linux zealots. For the other side someone need to write code and do system design, and there are not many of people for that. So, it’s better not to expect a solution anytime soon, if you are not planning to work on it by yourself.

They think it’s nice way to install command-line tools. I think that only spoil the idea of immutable system as a desktop OS, where ideally everything could be reduced to a single installation method.

That’s why I use the original Fedora Silverblue and have no interest in uBlue derivatives. Actually I want a more simplified base system and not more bloated one.

And yes, Flatpak is enough for everything (mind about Termux on Android).