I’m trying to figure out primary distro for framework 16. Currently using fedora for about year. I’ve package installation automated through ansible so technically using new distro is not big hassle still want to see if there is any other way of easily distro-hoping on bare metal.
I’m long time user of Ubuntu and now pop os so that’s one option and other is bazzite (or similar immutable). I would like to try at least those 2.
You can use LiveUSB. If you want to try them with their installation processes, you can try them on VM (e.g. QEMU).
Using VM may not reflect real hardware, tho. For this, I’d suggest more than one laptop. If you don’t have a spare, some cheap office surplus might help.
If you want to just use that one laptop, but don’t want to burn out your disk drive when you try out different installations, you can always use external drives.
A better question is what do you think is missing from the distribution you are currently using?
tldr: try the Qubes distro
HUGE disclaimer: The hibernate/sleep function doesn’t quite work on qubes on my framework and can freeze the computer. My framework is from 2020 so I just removed the old battery and basically power on and off the laptop every time I move it. It’s at home on my desk most of the time but can be REALLY ANNOYING for traditional laptop use cases.
I would recommend qubes. I love it and run it on my framework 13 b/c I can run multiple virtual machines of different distros at once, and also partition my personal, work, amd different hobbies into different “qubes” (vms).
The different distros I do run through qubes all use xfce so you dont quite get the full feeling of trying new distros through its vms. I do recommend trying the qubes distro in general though esp if you’re comfortable with linux and you’re interested in a distro that partitions out your hobbies/pc-uses.
You can split your ssd into a bunch of partitions install different distros in each, edit your bootloader config to make entries for the other partitions
Ventoy or LiveUSB if you just want to poke around. There honestly isn’t much difference between all distros anymore aside from package management, and that is somewhat being a bit pushed aside due to portable package distribution.
What exactly are you hoping to find or test?
Ventoy is risky and a bit sus for such a security-critical software.
Glim is another solution for ISO-multiboot-USB that doesn’t require as much trust.
Sure. I booted ventoy to test distros, but when it came time to install the final distro, I wiped ventoy and reflashed it.
Why is it “sus”? Isn’t it basically a bootloader for isos?
Probably in reference to the binary blob controversy. TL;DR Ventoy has always had unreproducible binaries in it and people want them buildable and documented for security reasons. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, here’s the currently active issue (there were several before this one): https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/3224
Because of all of the blobs it contains. That has caused a lot of people to not trust it.
Ventoy or liveusb is good for installing something but doesn’t seem good idea to actually run long term.
It’s not for long term anything at all, it’s just running a live distro to poke around.
This is why I asked my second question: what kind of things are you looking to check out or compare? That’s helpful in pointing you in the right direction.
If you’re unfamiliar, there is literally almost zero difference between distros aside from very tiny customizations and the underlying package management system.
You won’t find some distro with massive performance gains for any average task. You also won’t find a distro with some optimization that is special that can’t also be applied to any other distro.
So if you find something you like about one distro, you just put that on whatever you’re running (unless you’re talking about package mgmt). Easy Peasy.
Sorry didn’t notice second part as soon as I saw ventoy/liveusb. What I’m looking for is very superficial (apart from atomic distro). I’m looking to see if I like using distro. I’ve exact same packages on my fedora (laptop) and pop os (desktop), I keep thinking I still like pop os (maybe just what I’m used to).
Just to help her: what do you think PopOS is going to give you that Fedora will not?
Maybe just new DE. And I keep having intermittent issues with keyboard in fedora (can absolutely be hardware / firmware issue and I will see it in other distro as well
QuickEmu makes distrohopping in VMs easy.
I’ll check this, when it’s VM I don’t generally spend required time to use it (my problem). I just get on primary os, do whatever I wanted and log off. This is the main reason I’m hesitant of VM.
If you install one of the Fedora Atomic distros e.g., Silverblue, you can rebase to other atomic distros e.g., Bazzite very simply with a single command and reboot.
Oh interesting, I may need to look into atomic distro more. As of now I don’t understand what are features, pros/cons. I’ll read up but it’s definitely looking like way forward for me. If u have resources please link them.
The basic idea is read-only system files with flatpak for apps. A ‘rebase’ more or less downloads another system image to boot into. You can even rollback to prior images i.e., rollback to Silverblue.
The Fedora project explains it better and has additional resources here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/atomic-desktops/
Thanks
I’ll preface my comment with I understand my setup is no where similar to yours, but I’ll share my setup to hopefully give you an idea as to what you can do.
My desktop is running Unraid, and I’ve set it up with GPU pass through. This lets me spin up a machine with its own virtual drive with the OS installed. My other main folders (Documents, pictures, etc…) connect via network folders.
Pro: Can try out a bunch of OSs easily, and I don’t really care if I nuke my OS drive.
Con: The GPU passthrough can be very finicky. Admittedly, It was a struggle to get everything setup initially; but I think Unraid is working on streamlining that process.
I’d also recommend looking into setting it up in Proxmox first if you want to try this route. Proxmox is free, and Unraid is paid; so if you just want to play around with the idea, try the free version first.
Hope this helps!
I actually run proxmox on my homelab. What does unraid bring over pve? I didn’t think of running proxmox on desktop
You can just spin up VMs on any Linux distro. Running unraid as a desktop (or proxmox) is kinda ridiculous.
Is it terminal only?
