The highly abridged version is that Red Hat pays for and helps with developing Fedora and makes their money from providing support to companies that use it.

If they stopped supporting Fedora (would kind of kill their business model but let’s pretend) anyone could “fork” it and continue working on their own version just like other distros.

They were called that for most of their history until Jack Dorsey wanted to change the name to hype some crypto.

Yes, Square is a product that Block sells. Block was actually called “Square” until relatively recently and Jack Dorsey became obsessed with Blockchain.

Immutability just means the system files can’t be edited easily. Basically every time you update you’re updating the entire OS all at once. Which is a good way to keep things stable while also modern!

Unless there’s an application not available via Appimage or Flatpak (“app store”), most users will never even come up against the immutability aspect.

They own Square which is a card processing service typically used by small vendors. If you’ve ever gone to a festival or concert merch table or farmers market and they accepted credit card, it was probably Square.

That’s only a small part, they own Square.

They own Square which you’ve almost certainly used if you ever paid a small vendor via a payment card (as opposed to cash).

Are you kidding? It’s excellent as an everyday desktop! It is basically Fedora Kinoite with a bunch of quality of life stuff for gaming.

Very cool!

Don’t get me wrong I love what Zorin is doing but I still think Bazzite is going to be much more “set it and forge it” for gaming than Zorin.

You must be thinking of something else, they just pushed an update last week and are arguably rapidly becoming the closest thing Linux has ever been to mainstream. I just saw that my Life in Gaming (a channel about console gaming) just made a video about it.

Yeah I agree, Mint used to be my recommendation (and it’s a good choice for sure) but now I say Bazzite or Kinoite (for a newbie used to Windows) because KDE Plasma is better than Windows and the immutability adds another layer of stability.

Yeah Bazzite is excellent all around. It’s usually what I recommend to anyone with Nvidia.

Mint is for sure an excellent option but I recommend Fedora Kinoite (or Bazzite) these days for someone used to Windows because their immutability makes them even more solid and harder to break.

Zorin is great for a grandma, but for someone who knows computers I think it’s too simple.

Fedora Kinoite or Bazzite (which is based on Fedora Kinoite).

Both are “immutable” which all you need to know means they are essentially impossible to meaningfully break.

Both use the KDE interface which is very similar to Windows and very tweak-able.

They’re very similar, but Bazzite is the one to go with if you do a lot of gaming. It’s basically the Steam Deck OS plus a little more. I’ve tested Bazzite with an Nvidia card and had no issues whatsoever and performance was nearly identical to what I was getting with Windows.

So I actually ended up trying it out, and DistroShelf, Tailscale, OpenRazer and Solaar were not preinstalled. Not sure if I missed an option or not during install but I don’t think so 🤔

Bazarr is also on default Kinoite. So it seems the differences are relatively minor. Which is not a bad thing. Kinoite is one of the best out there IMO.

What makes Aurora different than Fedora Kinoite?

Mint is actually based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

If you want something you don’t have to fuss over, that’s very stable (but also gets frequent updates), and “just works” with most games? Bazzite is your answer.