Atomic Desktops

Linux Atomic Desktops, a concept derived from Fedora’s Project Atomic, are designed to provide a more reliable and manageable desktop environment. This initiative extends the principles of atomic updates to Fedora Workstation, aiming to enhance the stability and consistency of the Linux desktop experience.
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[@peterp4037]

Atomic desktop is almost impossible to break. Each new major update you get a new iso which is fresh installation without losing your files, apps and configuration.

[@UltraZelda64]

That's really not too much different than keeping a separate / and /home partition and doing a "fresh" install from disc instead of a traditional in-place upgrade every time a new version of the distro comes out. I used to use this method all the time to keep my machine up to date. Of course, it can be broken--but it can also easily be reinstalled, and it'd be like nothing ever happened.

[@M4XD4B0ZZ]

​@@UltraZelda64cute cat bro

[@conorturton]

So the same as every other major Linux distro then?

[@flow5718]

@@UltraZelda64 With regular old reinstallation of root, you would need to redo the system app installation and configuration though.

[@rjawiygvozd]

@@conorturton when regular distro updates, it takes your system which can be in whatever weird unpredictable state depending on what you were doing with it (like adding third party repos and installing a bunch of stuff from there) and then applies a bunch of updates on top of that which is not going to result in the same thing you get on fresh install even if it succeeds cause all of your changes will carry over. When atomic image based distro updates, the resulting system is guaranteed to be the same as fresh install. Actually it's always guaranteed to be the same as fresh install, even before the update

[@injuneer7942]

This was an especially exceptional video basically because you went through a bunch of examples showing exactly how to execute the action. Those of us that are relatively unskilled can follow along and duplicate your actions so we enjoy the benefits. Many thanks & WELL DONE!

[@donald1792]

wth you sound like a bot trying to gain trust in google's system

[@pauldunecat]

I'm really liking OpenSUSE Aeon. The first install is an image but thereafter it's just a daily auto transactional update. No layers no drama, if the update fails it just reverses it and nothing changes. If it's good your next reboot will be in the updated system. Simple!

[@flow5718]

Lisan Al-Catib

[@niek5067]

Yes. It's the best and most stable Linux experience I ever had. Combined with Distrobox it's perfect.

[@johnwestervelt1525]

Thanks for this Chris. Re Atomic desktops - Getting printing and scanning to work across all flatpak apps. This is an area that still needs a lot of work.

[@tohur]

After trying Bazzite and then learning how to make my own Images based from it I have completely moved over because Bazzite/Fedora Atomic is not as restrictive as they been made out to be.. being able to layer RPM packages over the base image with rpm-ostree makes it suitable for new and experienced users. the stability is second to none also on major updates best to do rpm-ostree reset to reset all the layering then relayer everything after running rpm-ostree upgrade also bruh Fedora aint forcing anything if ya really want something its in the repos just like any other distro

[@mikes-tech-tips]

Nice review of Atomic Desktops and Bazzite. Bazzite was my entry point for this new Atomic Desktops space and it has been very fun. Are you planning on making your own custom image based off of Bazzite with X11 and your other layered changes?

[@ChrisTitusTech]

Not based off Bazzite or ublue because Fedora 41 will get rid of X11 from the repos altogether.

[@mikes-tech-tips]

@@ChrisTitusTech I think the Atomic Desktop concept will probably arrive for all the other Linux flavours in the next couple of months. Guess we'll have wait until then for TitusTechAtomicArch 🤣

[@NamiberGames]

1:00 « So let’s break down… » nah, I don’t think you’ll be able to

[@evropej]

I am long time windows advanced user and moderate linux user. I tried finding and installing thorium. After five minutes of searching where to download and install a windows exe file installer, I gave up. People suffer from ignorance and cannot realize that people dont have the time or interest to learn every interface being different. It would be to hard to put a exe link download for windows users. The ignorance is beyond ignorance. All that effort for the software but just linux, 100 links to 100 things that non are documented and even if they are, who has the time to do it all for every single piece of software being different almost like debian hiding things. This is insanity! Software has become and endless pit of endless options none being the same and always changing giving the average person no chance at knowing what is good bad or right. I am an engineer and if this is my experience, the average person is completely lost. Thanks for doing what you are doing!

[@chuck-snow]

I'm hopping that the new System76 cosmic desktop comes out will be a great alternative to Debain.. whit newer eco system that what I hate the most about Debain that is always so behind I get it for a more stable system but now a days even the cutting edge is pretty stable..

[@TeamLinux01]

I have also been playing around with uCore images. Butane and Ignition are very interesting and pretty easy to use.

[@OraOraOra]

I really, really enjoyed your bazzite series! Always great to see you learning new things and giving them a fair shot! Bazzite is probably the Distro, that I'd recommend to friends & just tell them: "Here just click the update button once a week" or just automatic updates ... 😆 And yes.. relatable, I'd also prefer a Debian/Arch base. Arch is great, but I hate to rely on the AUR and Debian is a bit dated. Fedora is perfect, but damn IBM/RH.

[@StaffyDoo]

You should have Jorge Castro on your show, Chris 👌

[@knightwalker6561]

I like the the concept of the Atomic desktop in that it is stable and almost unbreakable but the bad part is Bazzite is based on Fedora which gets "updated" very frequently

[@ravijain1194]

Hey, Would you consider doing a video on Serpent OS. It's an atomic distro being built from the ground up with a brand new package manager, moss, which has it's first pre-alpha being released this last week. Some really interesting stuff already in the pre-alpha iso and a lot more looking to come. Ships with Gnome but has cosmic in the repo already and should get a separate iso in the coming week or two.

[@Cha0sNicr0]

I've always had the opinion that this can only really work for servers. Like the immutable/atomic container hosts, where you might layer in the odd package for your setup, but largely leave the base untouched while managing everything you need the server to provide as a container. A desktop is a highly personalized system to me and by definition every difference to the atomic base adds complexity. Most methods of mitigating this bring their own drawbacks. Snaps, flatpacks and appimages can lead to redundant dependencies as versions may be pinned or libraries statically linked or isolated. Layering defeats the purpose if you take it too far and if all my programs run in an arch distrobox, I might as well skip the overhead and run arch. Atomic systems only work if your workload is separated from the system, which a desktop running 60 seperate alterations to the base cannot do. If you only use a browser and office suite and the base already has all you need that works fine, I'd call that more of a chromebook- than a desktop-scenario though.

[@isrbillmeyer]

I keep on going back to Kubuntu. Atomic desktops is cool... But at the moment they are a bit of a pain to use. Will try again end of the year.

[@tanyesil]

all of this just to mimic a fraction of nixos' power

[@BPL-Whipster]

I've moved to nixos (btw). It kicks ass.

[@daliareds]

Yeah. The stability of atomic distros is great, but you're going to have a bad time if you ever need to reinstall the system or replicate it elsewhere. To me, it just seems like a normal distro, but exponentially more inconvenient

[@matthiasbendewald1803]

Yes, absolutely correct, but also at a fraction of the learning effort. Someone should create a wonderful NixOS gaming configuration and distribute it as gamix or Something, so that everyone can Just use that.

[@cjmoss51]

Ok so I wasnt the only one thinking it. Its insane to think that people are going to want to do all of this even for an immutable distro. Making everything a longer process and harder process just insulates people against doing it. With NixOS as long as you have that config file it goes and gets everything on its own. Infinitely better. I just wish I could trust the package managers

[@Waitwhat469]

@@daliareds Gotta fork the upstream and roll your own distro, that plus homemanager and you got a repeatable distro. Atomic desktops do make that actually easier. Both OpenSuse (Elemental) and Fedora (u-blue) have tooling to make it easy too!

[@elgoblinospark2949]

So many distros and flavors to maintain is the main reason why windows will never be replaced by linux.

[@bradmiles1984]

I don't think that is the reason by any means you're making a problem out of something that's not really an issue. Most distros are all really either fedora, debian, or arch with some GUI edits. As for DE's most people are on Gnome or KDE. The reason Windows is king because programs are based on it and some just can't work in Linux. If developers ever began actively supporting Linux too then Microsoft would crumble. Microsoft has been taking nothing but loses over the last few years.

[@theodiscusgaming3909]

That's super original, we have never heard that before. 🥱

[@lucascamelo3079]

Linux just need better support from third party apps: adobe, cad, etc. And also need better UX team (if any) for the free software in general.

[@ltpinecone]

I have never heard of these before oddly enough. Super cool! I am going to test Fedora SilverBlue in a VM for a bit.

[@ultimatetechcoding]

i thought it was some scary bomb about to be dropped in the next linux world war

[@markifi]

a 7.5 gigabyte install is completely fine, but only if it doesn't keep getting bigger like windows does.

[@bradmiles1984]

Not sure why HD2 doesn't work for Chris. It plays on my garuda KDE minimal install. I've never had an issue with HD2 the few months I've had it using both stock proton experimental and proton-ge. I do use wayland over x11 and the zen kernel.

[@Dr-CthulhuOfRlyeh]

12:50 I am not sure if others has noticed this, but a lot of these new gaming distros are choosing Fedora as their base. I know Manjaro plans to release one, but Manjaro updates are incredibly slow, as of 2 weeks ago they were still on Plasma 5 and Kernel 6.6 and for a gaming distro that isn't a good choice thing. Personally, I plan to stick to Nobara, I would like to try Bazzite since it seems to have a much bigger team than Nobara, but I want to let it cook a little more and see where it goes, they both use the same custom kernel anyway, Nobara seems to update faster and if it isn't broke, don't fix it.

[@emilnordgard5228]

Well nixos is always there yk. I know you're not yet super comfy in it. But eventually it will click!

[@personalwatching9312]

Why is it called a distro and not an os? Linux newbie here. Installed mint yesterday and LOVE IT!!! OMG

[@peterjansen4826]

If Chris can't break it then you know that the user won't break it either. If it can be broken then Chris will find a way to do so. :p

[@bladman9700]

i swear chris you'll eventually find a way to break an immutable distro.

[@ChrisTitusTech]

Ohhh I did ;)

[@donreid240]

A successful experiment Chris and lots of great ideas for me, which Atomic Distro would you use if not Fedora?

[@DaEpic]

MicroOS looks good ? I guess

[@Alex-zu5jh]

​@@DaEpicMicro OS is the almost the same as Fedora Atomic. It uses transactional-update, but there is a lot less documentation. I used to check fix for Fedora Silverblue and adapting to Micro Os

[@sokoloft3]

I'm kinda surprised my manjaro install on my laptop is going strong 2+ years later. Its about time I re-do it and I'll probably go arch this go around, with xfce. Just use arch installer script since its packaged with the usb now.

[@Chrispycode]

Helldivers 2 also works on manjaro

[@jamesprice4074]

Fedora with BTRFS snapshots and Timeshift is a solid setup. There are some YT videos showing you how to install with the @ and @home subvolumes so Timeshift works correctly.

[@flow5718]

At that point, just use openSUSE 😂 Fedora's dnf rollback doesn't play well with btrfs/snapper rollback.

[@kvndodson91]

That's just OpenSUSE with extra steps

[@OraOraOra]

I don't know why dafuq Fedora uses BtrFS, without the correct subvolume layout for Timeshift OR Snapper rollbacks. It's probably because RH/IBM wants some more data on BtrFS, because even RHEL doesn't use BtrFS, I don't get it...

[@jamesprice4074]

@@kvndodson91 Good to know, thanks.

[@Knight_IV]

HD2 works really, realy well on Nobara. I have way less crashes there than on my Win partition.

[@Aoitori365]

the driver for my wifi dongle needs to be built and installed with dkms and it has never worked on any immutable distro

[@shaunpatrick8345]

I used Silverblue for about 6 months last year and can't see any benefits over a stable traditional distro. It's great for something like a Steamdeck, and is very similar to what Chromebooks use, but beyond commodity hardware it's just not worth the hassle. That "distrobox export" command reduces the hassle and is something I don't recall Toolbox having, but would it work for web apps? Copying launcher files and icons from the container into the system app menu was always a pain, so anything that can help would be welcome. I first tried Silverblue at version 36, which was broken out of the box due to a conflict between dnf and Gnome Software requiring different versions of a config file. Last year there was a problem with the upgrade server which meant nothing was released for several weeks (searching the web to find the exact time reveals it to be a regular bug). There was also an issue with Toolbox being broken by an image upgrade, which meant I had to rollback every upgrade until I had time to reinstall all my Chromium-based browsers and recreate app menu links for web apps.

[@MrBelascoaranShayne]

Can you make a video testing antitrack apps like Norton or others, please? There seems to be no reviews on KZbin about these apps

[@rabidrivas]

Is there a reason the link to the webpage isn't in the description?

[@sumdamwog3133]

It's Chris. He broke it. 🤣

[@Xpun-oi2zz]

Quick question. So you say Linux Mint is a beginners OS. Okay. So then, whats the next step, the next OS to jump to ?

[@jrowen76]

do you suggest not layering browsers, or is it ok? say from a local rpm...

[@tgmct]

I don't like Fedora as a base either. I've been down on Fedora ever since they went to their 6 month upgrades; many, many moons ago. Centos was great for years until IBM got into the mix. Is there an atomic desktop available w/o Fedora in a ProxMox environment? BTW Fedora 40 w/ KDE has been problems for me under ProxMox. My guess is Wayland, but who knows. I don't have the time to do extensive troubleshooting.

[@FARDEENKHANQWE123]

cool but,i just game on my pc. could we focus on making linux simple... i really want to switch to linux instead of upgrading from windows 10 to window 13.

[@airmancooma]

Democracy runs quite well on Fedora 40!

[@davidnickel3949]

This app image launcher is better than app image launcher?

[@mysteryk2283]

like tod howard... sweet jesus have you played bethesda games since... * checks notes * their first release?

[@vladimir_fomin90]

I'm waiting for Arch Atomic😀

[@oscs4556]

There already arch atomic desktops - blendos and arkane

[@JSJS-vi5fs]

What's Garuda Dr460nised Gaming Edition like? Is it a solid gaming distro? I'm hoping to install it, as a new Linux convert... lol Thanks in advance, for any help anyone can proffer. 😅

[@bradmiles1984]

It's good, it's just Arch with things loaded for you so you can get to gaming right away.

[@albo5106]

Thanks!

[@ChrisTitusTech]

Thanks for the support!

[@LightBusterX]

So, atomic desktops are what FreeBSD calls "boot environments"?

[@SimonJackson13]

So basically a few mount --bind commands run from an unmounted on top of a new ISO with hard permissions.

[@SimonJackson13]

Sounds like a job for a chmod +x /proc/grub/automount.

[@comesignotus9888]

Putting a "like" for the video for digging into the topic, not a "like" for atomic desktops or Arch though :) RedHat is very bad, Fedora still is very good for the new hardware and I like its semi-rolling nature, Debian is just good with backports. KDE6 and Wayland are good :)

[@knofi7052]

I'm not sure but NixOS seems to be the better solution for me...😊

[@livingcodex9878]

yup

[@ChrisTitusTech]

I really love NixOS and having everything in a config file is crazy powerful.

[@augustdeer]

Is there a reason to use Bazzite over Bluefin if I'm not a serious gamer?

[@zakt9]

Bazzite has steam and additional gaming applications on the base image. With bluefin you can run steam and play games, but you would need to use distrobox or flatpak to install it. Which can come with limitations not present if steam was just on the base image.

[@lKrauzer]

There is already immutable Debian, even earlier than Fedora

[@flow5718]

What? Where? I didn't know Debian had an atomic version 🤯

[@Chaotic_Oven]

@@flow5718 They're talking about VanillaOS I think

[@LiveLife378]

You"ll love blendOS v3 or 4.0

[@leonidasuno3803]

Reinstalo winget not work. Fix???

[@KenSherman]

Next: quantum desktops?

[@ronm6585]

Thanks.

[@YannMetalhead]

Great video!

[@anonymouscommentator]

every time i watch your videos i get the feeling you are the king of sciolism which is kinda dangerous imo

[@sumdamwog3133]

I'm confused. Did I miss something? Chris && Red Hat == ??? I thought there were no more words to be said? 😵‍💫

[@oscs4556]

OpenSuse kalpa is a better base for atomic desktops

[@pvchmykh]

Does 'I disagree with destro decisions' equals 'distro isn't good'?

[@livingcodex9878]

It means that it doesn't match one's personal taste.

[@pvchmykh]

@@livingcodex9878 I think dude just said Fedora is bad because he don't like decisions.

[@livingcodex9878]

@@pvchmykh Timestamp?

[@pvchmykh]

@@livingcodex9878 around 12:49

[@livingcodex9878]

​@@pvchmykhI mean he starts by stating that he personally doesn't like Fedora because e.g. it (arbitrarily) cuts support for xorg. I don't know if this legitimizes his claim that Fedora isn't a great distro since I don't know anything about that distro, but it's definitely not a good one for him in that case.

[@cpsemple]

Todd Howard? Teen Wolf?

[@quarteratom]

Storage is never cheap. Have you seen how much storage costs in laptops and tablets and phones?

[@MrAlanCristhian]

Debian: "Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power "

[@siliconpirate8291]

i think this guy is on the verge to end his life , because he thinks he wasted a life loading screens .

[@philfedora495]

Does the layering cause the system to slowdown?

[@oserodal2702]

No, cause it's just (reductively speaking) additional files.

[@suyogmule3630]

Atomic desktops... Hmmm.... Sounds like Android to me

[@realizer7785]

Can we play valorant on it

[@Aoitori365]

it breaks dkms

[@user-ct8zg4nb3g]

A curious question: Are there people over eighty years of age who are very elderly people who own modern smart phones??

[@user-ct8zg4nb3g]

A curious question: Are there people over eighty years of age who are very elderly people who own modern smart phones???!!

[@benjy288]

So its kind of like a worse version of Nixos?

[@rebelg]

I can here to say the same thing

[@steve_account]

I enjoy that Linux is just a very well designed high school project. It's like "oh that looks cool" as 99% of all companies require employees to have the desktop version of Excel/ MS Access and at minimum one Adobe product. Maybe one day the Linux community will find a compromise with these software companies. Oh well

[@neXIITem]

Linux will keep developing and better itself, we don't need these software packages to Support linux, more and more software is also changing to beign online-only or web apps which as we know work perfectly fine in linux as well.

[@steve_account]

@@neXIITem Google says 3.88% market share. Idk if it's that high yet though..

[@octopusonfire100]

You are literally the angry soyjack with the cool mask meme.

[@barry5]

@@octopusonfire100 This might be the most braindead comment i have ever seen on youtube. Please reread what you just wrote, if possible say it out loud, and then reconsider all life choices that led you to putting those words in that order.

[@steve_account]

@@octopusonfire100 Thank you