Howdy! Hmmm, not sure I understand the first question. What put me off? So far I really like Bluefin. Most of my Linux experience prior to this was with Ubuntu, I’ve been tinkering with it since it’s second or third release. I also played with some lightweight Xfce based distros for a bit, I think it was the original damnsmalllinux?

At any rate, I daily drove Ubuntu for a year or so, every few years. I always faded away for various reasons, ending up back on Windows.

I’ve always had some flavor of Debian on a spare machine laying around somewhere though. My extremely unimpressive home server has always ran Ubuntu.

I toyed with arch on an old Chromebook, but that wasn’t for me at all.

I got a steam deck when they first came out, and that reinvigorated my desire to play with Linux on the desktop. But that still didn’t push me over the edge into installing it on my main machine.

I bought a framework 13, my first brand new laptop… Ever. Always went used or hand me downs. I decided it was time, I’m ready to go full Linux. I’m sick of all this win 11 crap.

So I did a lot of research, asked some questions around here, and ended up on bluefin. My main desire was stability. I’m not afraid of poking around in the command line, I’m fairly comfortable there for basic stuff. But my installs always seem to slowly acquire and accumulate… Issues. As I use them. Little things that build up, little issues that become show stoppers. I’ve never successfully (as in, without any issues at all) upgraded from one version of Ubuntu to the next.

Maybe that’s all Ubuntu’s fault? (I don’t care for it anymore, it’s not like it used to be) Or maybe it’s just a Linux thing? Or maybe I’m just more destructive than I realize?

At any rate, atomic/immutable seemed like the way to go for me. The second I heard about it, I was skeptical, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it would solve my issues.

The core is stable, and unless I purposely dig into it, it’ll stay stable. Theoretically. Flat packs can come and go, but when I need my machine for something, it’ll be there and waiting.

I’ve only had it for a couple months now, and so far I love it. Recently I had to install zoom on it, there’s a flatpak. It’s… A little buggy, in some weird ways. Sluggish at times… But stable enough for what I need.

Most recently I installed OBS flatpak so I could screen record zoom. I expected issues, but I only had one tiny one, and a quick Google had me change one setting, and I was off. No issues. Felt good.

I’m running gimp and audacity, rythmbox, and others I can’t think of. So far so good.

I AM having a reoccurring issue with Firefox, suddenly it will crash every new tab I open until I restart it. But I haven’t looked into that yet, been too busy. That’s pretty annoying when it happens.

And yes I meant distro boxes, the one that basically installs a simultaneous version of another distro, and it shares your home folder? Works pretty well for what I need thus far, which was just to run git to compile some project files.

But I’m also running boxes, the VM. I have a couple highly specific, and therefore identifying so I won’t be sharing them here, windows apps that I need. One can’t run in proton, the other is connected to a delicate shared database I’d rather not corrupt, so I’m just doing what I have to do. At the end of the day, a computer is a tool, and I’m gonna do what I gotta do to do what I gotta do. But when I can ditch windows completely, I will.

Sorry for the wall of text, hopefully that answers your questions 😅

Edit: oh one last thing. I do wish I had gone with a kde variant. I recently learned that you can still do some of the compiz window management tricks in plain kde. I miss those.