I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.

Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.

TL;DR I am a nerd.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2024

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  • I highly recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed (or Slowroll). It is a rock-solid rolling-release where most things can be done from the YaST GUI. The installer is very granular, you can pick and choose based on groups of programs (like internet, office, desktop environment, etc) or individual packages (in advanced mode).

    It has never broke on me and I have used it on and off for several years now. I like to tinker so I often do reinstalls of other distros when I break them but never needed to with Tumbleweed.

    It is modern but not unfamiliar, rolling but not unstable, granular but not overwhelming (imho).

    If rolling-release isn’t your thing there is also openSUSE Slowroll which does updates monthly (apart from security updates which are back ported)

    Even if you don’t pick Tumbleweed, there are plenty of good options. Rapid fire I’ll recommend some others.

    • Fedora Workstation: my next favorite distros for many of the same reasons as Tumbleweed, semi-rolling and major updates every 6 months, but no YaST or granular installer. It uses GNOME desktop environment.

    • Fedora Atomic: pretty much Fedora Workstation but more stable because the root filesystem is read-only and updates are pushed as an OCI image. You can still install anything supported by Fedora.

    • Universal Blue: Modified versions of Fedora Atomic which aim to be much more user-friendly and preconfigured out of the box. I recommend them over Fedora Atomic vanilla images. Bazzite is my recommendation for any gamer on Linux (though most distros work).

    If you want to have a good experience on Linux, avoid perpetually out of date distros like Debian/Ubuntu and their derivatives. Linux game support is always improving, same thing with basically everything, so dont kneecap yourself with slow/stable release distros.


  • I personally like flatpak and its build system. Flatpak applications are sandboxed by default and don’t require root during any part of installation, reducing the risk of malicious/broken software damaging the host. They also are available for basically any base distro, meaning i can use the same apps if a ever distrohop and i can even just copy over the config folders as if nothing happened.





  • Mostly because Fedora is more popular. I like both.

    openSUSE Tumbleweed gives you much more control of what gets installed by default (you can customize every package during the GUI installer). It has been the most stable distro ive used. It is a “rolling-release” distro, meaning that packages usually get updates quicker from upstream. If you dont like getting frequent updates it may not be for you. A key feature of openSUSE distros is the system management apl Yast, which allows you to manage a lot of stuff from a GUI.

    Fedora is also quite stable. I think it’s more user-friendly in my experience. After Debian/Ubuntu based distros, Fedora is the most likely to have packages built for it by developers (I’m talking 1st-party builds, not repacks). Fedora is a semi-rolling release, meaning updates are frequent but not constant.

    Fedora is currently my distro off choice, but I may soon use Tumbleweed again. I daily drove Tumbleweed for a year on both my general PC and my admin computer.





  • Actually, in the case of a web browser, Flatpak weakens both Firefox’s and Chromium’s internal sandboxing, possibly allowing for breaking of cross-site or site-host boundaries. Firefox is even weaker then Chromium as a Flatpak because it can’t use the zypak fork server. Both are weakened, best to avoid.

    For basically any other app, Flatpak can be beneficial as a sandbox.

    Basically, don’t sandbox browsers because its like wearing 2 condoms. The only sandboxing tool I know that doesn’t interfere with the browser’s sandbox (and also doesnt allow for the possibility of privilege escalation, like Firejail) is Bubblejail

    PS: Since you mentioned you are on Fedora, Bubblejail is offered through this COPR repo from the Secureblue team. It provides a sandbox without interfering with the browser’s sandbox. It comes with profiles for Firefox and Chromium. Only issue ive experienced is that the sandbox works, aka it means I can’t access files from my home directory unless explicitly given permission to a folder.