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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Of the remaining ones I’d say Fedora is probably the safest bet. Not as cutting edge as the other two, but well engineered and stable.
    Rolling releases like Tumbleweed and Endeavour can be more interesting and partifularly good for gaming because they always have the newest stuff and patches and performance improvements. Which can also bite you a bit in the back though if you have an Nvidia graphics card. Nvidia doesn’t play too well with open source and they don’t put a lot of effort into it, so the newest versions of their drivers occasionally break or do stupid stuff. Which isn’t a big deal if you have a system that can rollback (tumbleweed can, dunno about endeavour) but might be a bit annoying sometimes


  • Those all sound like good distributions to me. Although I would probably scratch NixOS off that list if you don’t want to start out with something complex. It is an extremely unique distro which does things very differently than most distros. Which isn’t a bad thing, but unless that’s specifically what you’re looking for, I’d probably choose something more traditional as first distro.











  • How does installing packages or configuring software work, if system files can’t be changed?

    On reboot. You install your changes into a separate part of the filesystem that’s not running and then “switch parts” on next boot. Different distros do this differently. Vanilla OS has an AB system which basically works like Android does it, openSUSE uses btrfs snapshots and Fedora also uses btrfs I think but they got a more complex layering system on top.

    I get that there’s a security benefit just in that malware can’t change system files – but that is achieved by proper permission management on traditional systems too.

    Is it though? All it takes is a misconfiguration or exploit to bypass it, so having several layers of protection isn’t a bad thing and how any reasonably secure system works. And having parts of your system predetermined as read only is a comparably tough nut to crack.