For years, I’ve gotten by with a desktop at home running Arch and a work laptop running Kubuntu. Now I want a laptop that’s not owned by my job, so that I can use a computer outside the house and not have my workplace own the IP rights of whatever I do on it. My workload is basically just going to be emacs and web browsing, so basically any distro can do it.

I’ve already got the laptop (HP Elitebook 840 G5, secondhand), but now it’s time for the distro. I don’t plan to use this laptop often, since it’ll mostly be when I travel a few times a year. I don’t want Arch, because I don’t want to install 6 months of software updates the night before a vacation and then hope that everything works.

Thus, I’m looking at Fedora Silverblue, since that can apply updates atomically on the system, and I can always roll back. I’m wondering if anyone else has good recommendations for a distro to serve my needs.

  • Mx Phibb@reddthat.comEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    I’m fond of Linux Mint: Debian Edition for most of my computers, but run Solus on my travel laptop (recent change), though both of those might be problematic for your needs. Perhaps regular Linux Mint?

  • Bombastic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    Voting for debian as well. Apt upgrade never gave me any hassle when i needed to update anything in a pinch

  • MangoKangaroo@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Since you’re experienced, I think Debian is appropriate. Rock-solid, well-supported, and comes with a decent variety of DE options. I personally rock GNOME and have Timeshift set up for rollbacks if necessary.

  • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Any of the openSUSE distros should be fine. They have immutable offerings in Aeon (Gnome) and Kalpa (KDE). I can’t speak to them but I recently updated Tumbleweed after eighteen months and it was fine.

  • linuxisfun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite, as you will reliably be able to update the system, even after half a year of not using it.

    Updates are atomic, so either an update is installed successfully or no changes to your system have been done whatsoever, there is no in-between state (i. e. broken system) possible.

  • Another Person @lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Any mainstream distro should work I feel like. I’m not familiar with Fedora Silverblue so I can’t say anything about it.

  • di5ciple@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    NixOS, i was a long time btrfs with snapshots Arch user. But Nix is just more stable and makes my life happy knowing it will always work as a server, desktop, or on a laptop. The config file is easy to read as documentation as code. That can reproduce the setup and even use flakes and home-manager to copy all your dot-files with ease. Just modify the version number in the file to update it and all apps are independent of each other with no weird dependencies. Better rollbacks then btrfs as it uses systemd and you can save git of your configuration files. This is the future

  • BCsven@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I found the GUI interface for firewalld on OpenSUSE was beneficial for travel. You set your open services and ports per zone: Public, Trusted, Home, work, etc. And when you connect to a network just move adapter to the appropriate Zone in the network dropdown settings. This way you arent a single zone and changing ports all the time.

  • garam@lemmy.my.idEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Got with Fedora, Fedora Kionite, Silverblue, anything. rpm ostree, and if you need other things, go with distrobox. RPM OS Tree will be standard near future, I think.

    But I will stick with XFCE Spin tho

  • bour@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I too use Arch on my desktop (on a daily basis). I think you will find MX Linux to be a great fit for your secondary device. It works like a charm on my laptop.