Arch has rarely ever given me problems...that I didn't cause myself 🤣

distro hopping is a waste of time.

Very much so. There are limitless things you can do with a computer. Installing a new OS for me falls squarely in the annoying and tedious categories.. There are so many more interesting things to put effort into.

Nix was my stop

Yeah there isn't much of a difference as there used to be, now it's mostly about package management and what is installed by default, not that that's bad, choice is always great.

It's hard to explain until you've used it, but in my experience I think this is much different than a traditional Linux distro. Every other distro I've tried has (to some extent) dependencies that can get out of whack, configuration drift that makes it hard to get things to work sometimes, random codecs or drivers or other things you need to install to get a system working as it should, etc. In the "cloud native" model, all the packages, drivers, etc. are built and tested in the cloud. So when they arrive on your machine, they "just work" and updates are handled automatically - it's great. Maybe not great for tinkerers, but great for regular users who just want to use their computer.

Okay right but why would "cloud native" as the community's marketing for it be considered a red flag. Someone who doesn't know better would think oh "cloud native" Kubernetes is evil. When really the moniker mostly means it was designed to be highly scalable, to interface with public cloud API's, among many other decisions that differentiate traditional enterprise I.T. software (which like Cisco products) could have its own fair share of "evilness" to be avoided.

My point was that O.P. should clarify why that's such an immediate red flag for them.

To future readers I consistently use "cloud native" software on my bare metal computers at home. It's mostly a marketing term to reflect "modern ness" in software features to be run on a public cloud.

In my experience cloud native doesn't mean it's on Google, or Microsoft's privacy stealing software because they're marketing to you that you can host it yourself on the public cloud.

Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, "cruft" accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as "immutable". Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don't leave the system in an inconsistent state.

What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

Is that helpful at all? There's also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.

Pretty much the same however it would be like you're working inside a docker container to cover and build your container images.

In this setup your entire os is a container also. It's just another layer. This is the same way the Steam Deck distributes updates and many of us believe to be the future for the next wave of Linux users.

I have to admit the fact that I got the metaphor BEFORE I got all of the technical aspects might be a sign that it was given more attention than projects normally do. I personally love how fun and dorky it is though