Trying out Atomic desktops. Bazzite and Silverblue are pretty easy, coming from Ubuntu and Gnome. I read about the Cosmic desktop environment and have decided to give that a shot. Atomic desktops have forced some relearning of habits, and Cosmic is good but I wouldn’t say I love it, today. I’m not a developer, just a curious person and hobbyist. I support Windows, MacOS and iOS professionally–so I have opinions.

I have made it an imperative to keep myself agile in the sense that I can do most things I like no matter what operating system is in front of me. There are some things inside of the Apple ecosystem that I do prefer every bit as much as I prefer Apple Hardware. But I have to say that being able to run a reasonably secure OS and modern applications on a modern kernel on hardware that isn’t supported any longer from the commercial operating systems is pretty lovely.

Oh, also trying a rolling release: OpenSuse Tumbleweed. I like the speed they incorporate Linux kernel updates. I already have kernel 7.2 running there.

Mind you, I’m not running production services on these personal laptops. Firefox, Edge (for when I have to do something work-related, I can set up and use profiles), Discord, 1Password. All of these have flatpak installs.

I do have a project in mind to migrate my Windows-based Plex server to Linux, but I want to build that in parallel with my current machine so that I’m not down while I bring the new machine up. It’s looking a lot like there are good Linux versions or substitutes for MakeMKV, Handbrake, and ExactAudio Copy. I feel I can support my current habits without major news expenses on equipment or software.