I’m constantly switching between Gnome and KDE (Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, Kinoite, Silverblue, whatever) and I never had any issues.
The only thing that gets messed up a bit is theming, where I have to change the GTK theme, and sometimes the window buttons when I go from KDE to Gnome, which is also reverted in just one click in Gnome tweaks.

100% AMD, for sure. AMD won’t make much problems and works ootb.

Nvidia on the other hand… if you already have a Nvidia GPU, then the proprietary drivers work pretty well, but even those won’t work flawlessly and still cause problems for many people.
And the FOSS drivers are still in the early stages and won’t cut it. So why spend lots of money for a piece of hardware that won’t give you the performance you paid for?

Also, Nvidia clearly doesn’t care about PCs or its’ users, so why support such a shitty company with your money?

I’ve also got my first “Hot chicks in your area, click this link for a hot chat 🥵” message in my inbox.

Guys, we’ve made it. We’re officially mainstream now! Yay!

1. Distro choice

I would recommend you either Aurora or Bluefin.
Both are pretty much the same, but differ in their desktop environment.

Traditionally, Gnome (Bluefin) always has been the champion in terms of being tablet-like, but from what I’ve heard, KDE has surpassed Gnome in terms of how well it works as a tablet UI.

You can install the one or the other, and then later “rebase” to the other variant without needing to reinstall anything if you want to try the “competitor” or if you’re unhappy.

This basically switches out the base system, but your installed apps and pictures are decoupled and kept. Like just doing a big update :D

Why do I recommend you exactly that, and not just base Fedora or Kubuntu or whatever?

Simple - you need to install the linux-surface kernel (and stuff), because without it, nothing will work, no stylus, no sleep, no battery, basically nothing.

But said modified kernel is nothing ordinary, and might shit itself randomly.

Not only would you have to install everything by hand, which was a task that not only let me return to Windows once, but twice as Linux noob! It also causes a lot of headache when you have to spend your evening fixing it via CLI or whatever.

Here uBlue comes handy: you can “fix” your system with just one click.

• Smort silica rock not thinking?
• Grub says “NØ” after system update?
• Me not care, me pressing space while booting, me selecting yesterday image, me watching YouTube when eating because me don’t care, knowing that dev daddy is already working on fix that ship tomorrow.

You don’t even have to do manual updates or whatever, everything is done in the background for you, just like on your smartphone.

You have to select the “I have a Surface device” option, and then everything comes pre-bundled and (hopefully) just werks™

2. Note taking and PDFs

I don’t know 🤷

3. SD card

🤷

4. Stylus

I believe KDE is better, because it has many wacom tablet input settings and features, but I sold that crappy Surface ages ago when Gnome was the obvious choice. The 🤷 also applies here I guess, because it was two years ago and felt like a completely different age compared to today.

I’ve tried pretty much any FOSS launcher out there, and I always return to Kvaesitso.

It feels very natural and smooth, while being minimalistic and extremely functional.

Especially the search is the best there is. The built in calculator (“1+1”; “3 inch in cm”; etc.) is so fucking useful and finding stuff is blazing fast.

I recommend you doing so, but not as a security measure, more of so as a “keeping everything organised”-measure.

I like to keep my host OS clean and install everything containerised

You did everything right. Boot into the image that works, and then apply rpm-ostree rollback. This reverses the broken image and the working one, so you’ll boot into this one the next time you boot up until you change something in the order, e.g. by updating.

In the meantime, wait a day or so and then update again.

On what channel are you on? bazzite:latest or bazzite:stable?

Same. I still really love Gnome with my heart, but it just felt… inferior… compared to KDE 6.

Everything looked sharper, like if I had switched from 720p to 4k, I could access my hardware better (e.g. control the brightness of my monitor, etc.) and much more.

Regarding backups: check out, if your WiFi router supports network sharing. If so, you can just plug in an USB or external drive and share it over your local network

Whoops! Then it is even older, you’re correct.
Then it’s a 2012 model.

I hate Apple with passion, but my GF has a 2013 Macbook, that is still getting security updates and is totally usable.

I replaced the spinning hard drive a while ago with a fast SSD, while using Clonezilla to copy the content and partitions of the drive.

And you know what? It started like a rocket. It has an Intel CPU, but I don’t think installing Linux would have made it much better, especially UX wise.

MacOS is more than half the reason most people buy a Mac and not a cheap laptop.

Still nice meme tho. It’s way more relatable than I want to admit it.

Here’s my perspective. I’m exactly that kind of guy you mean.

As soon as someone mentions “immutable distro”, I get triggered and start shilling for Bazzite et al.

Why you might ask? Because I like using it, and because the guys behind it are chill dudes with a great vision and a lot of know-how.

I’m just a normal guy without IT skills. I can’t code myself, I can’t review someone’s else code, I can’t do anything.

But I wish I could.

The only thing I am able to is making it more well known.
If someone asks “What distro do you recommend for gaming?”, I’ll say “Bazzite”.

Someone else might say “Arch”, and another one “Tumbleweed”. Everyone likes their own thing, and everyone shills for something else :)

I really wish your theory was real, then I could make some $$$, but everything here is FOSS. The devs are just as broke as I am…

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Why not just use both? Install Windows, create a Linux VM, and inside the VM, another Windows box, with active WSL too of course.

Usually only as long as I play games. After that, I shut it off. Why?

• I run Bazzite, which updates itself in the background, but needs a restart to complete
• It boots in seconds, because modern hard drives are crazy fast
• The standby-LED is annoying when I sleep

My laptop is usually on for a week, but I restart it from time to time, for the same reasons, and because devices need some sleep too! 😴

Fedora Atomic IS immutable. Rpm-ostree just layers (or hides) stuff on top of the already existing image. If you layer something, e.g. Nvidia drivers, you still download the same image everyone else uses, but basically compile the driver from fresh and put it on top. And that takes time. This is the reason using rpm-ostree to layer stuff is not recommended.

That’s why uBlue exists for example. It gives you a sane start setup, where all drivers are already built in into the image. And then you can either use the clean base and add your own stuff to create your own image, or use already great ones like Bluefin or Bazzite, where everything you want is already included.

Atomic just means that every process is either completed without errors, or not at all. This way, you don’t get an half updated and broken system for example in case you loose power. Happened to me quite a few times already, but never with Fedora Atomic.

Pretty much anything outside of /var/ (even /home/ is placed inside /var/) is read-only, and if you want to modify your install, you have to build your own image. Therefore, it is both immutable AND atomic.

That’s why I prefer the term “image based”

• You can still apply updates live, e.g. on Bazzite (Fedora Atomic) with the --apply-live tag (or however it’s spelled).
• The root partition isn’t read only per se, but you have to change the upstream image itself instead of the one booted right now. You can use the uBlue-Builder for example to make your own custom Bazzite spin just for you if you want.
• Both aren’t inherently secure or insecure. It’s harder to brick your system, yeah, for sure, but you can still fuck up some partitions or get malware. It’s just better because everything is transparently identifiable (ostree works like git), saved (fallback images), containerised and reproducible.
• And you can still install system software, e.g. by layering it via rpm-ostree. Or use rootful containers in Distrobox and keep using apt or Pacman in there.

“Cloud native” means in this context, that the images are being built centrally by “the cloud” (in this case, it’s GitHub actions, but could be replaced by something else) and then the identical copies of the OS are distributed downstream.

Contrary to traditional package manager based distros, this is more efficient and reliable.

At least that’s the mission from what I know, but I also might be wrong. Then please correct me :)

If you’re a fan of that principle, then consider checking out Logseq.

It’s main workflow is that you use the Journal page and write down everything that’s on your mind, may it be projects, research, social stuff, or whatever.

And while writing, you link that stuff with other stuff, and in the end, even when forgetting the exact search cues, you can go hunting for words mentally, and always find what you wrote months ago.

Obsidian, the competitor of it, is also great, but more similar to traditional note taking software, and therefore more hierarchical.

Logseq is FOSS too btw!

Thanks for your experience report!

Yeah man, Aurora (and uBlue in general) is fucking amazing. I’m using it on my laptop, and Bazzite on my gaming PC, which is pretty much almost the same tbh.

Sometimes, people here on Lemmy might think I’m getting paid by someone to make advertisements for uBlue, but it’s literally the best distro I tried so far.

It’s one of the few distros I would recommend for non-techy people, like my mum or friends.

The only thing I dislike about Aurora in particular is the release schedule of KDE.

Bluefin (Gnome) offers a gts variant, which offers older (and therefore more stable) packages, so you have half a year of extra testing.

Sadly, KDE doesn’t allow that, so it’s more of a rolling release, like you said. Because of that, my experience with Aurora has been a bit worse than Bluefin, but still better than most other distros with KDE imo.

EDIT: Dumbass me chose aurora:latest and not aurora:stable, no wonder I constantly got brand new packages. Ignore the last part.