So, I finally got around to picking up a Thinkpad and I’ve been trying to decide which flavour of Linux I want to use on it, long term. It’s only been a few days, and I’ll definitely write another blog post in a month or so once I’ve settled into more confident opinions, but for now I wanted to share some of my findings from my preliminary distrohopping.

Before we start, I should give a bit of backstory, because I’m not exactly a novice in this domain. I have more than 15 years of experience tinkering with Linux in one form or another. I began back in the aughts where most people do, installing various flavours of Ubuntu onto old computers. I remember being so proud that I got Lubuntu installed on an iMac G3 and made it feel relatively Mac-like, though of course back then Linux could barely even play video on most websites because everything was Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and other proprietary, DRM garbage. That made it pretty hard to seriously consider Linux as a twenty-something.

Nevertheless I persisted, and as many before me, I wiped my main PC, (accidentally) as I installed Ubuntu. Unity, Canonical’s homegrown desktop environment was the default back then and was truly impressive looking, but it was also janky as hell and alongside Ubuntu’s other quirks, I couldn’t see myself putting up with such a frustrating level of bugginess for long. So I did the standard beginner progression from Ubuntu to LinuxMint. And of course that was a lot better. I think I went at least 6 months of using Mint for some of my day to day computing. But I would always go back to Mac for my university work, hobby music recording, and to load music onto my iPhone in the pre-streaming days.

Through the 2010s I always had at least one computer to experiment with Linux on. An old Thinkpad with 2 GB of RAM, a Macbook Air with 4 GB of RAM, a Lenovo Y40 gaming laptop (RAM was user-upgradable and I took it from 4 to 16 GB), an Alienware desktop with an Nvidia card (headaches ensued), and finally a Dell XPS 13.

The default recommendation, Ubuntu, no matter how many times I gave it another chance, would cause me headache after headache with random broken drivers, perpetually out of date software missing key features, and of course, user error as I tried to fix things by ignorantly copy-pasting commands from forum posts and youtube comments into my terminal as root.

The Many Jobs of Steve, or: How I Learned to Let Tim Cook

I eventually got more familiar with the terminal and found some distros that worked better for me. I settled into Manjaro for a while, and later, daily drove Fedora on both a laptop (the aforementioned Lenovo) and a desktop (the Alienware) for 3 full years. I gave away the Lenovo to a friend when I got the XPS. Then, during the pandemic I needed money and since I had a work Macbook I was able to take home, I decided to sell off my Dell XPS laptop and my Alienware Desktop and as a result, for a while I had no easy way to visit the penguin.

Then, after a few years of working professionally on creative work (writing, graphic design, and video editing), all of which I would do on my work Macbook, I decided to buy myself an M2 Macbook Air as a sort of backup plan in case I ever left my job and gave up my only computer.

Regardless of what you think of Apple, their M series laptops are marvels of engineering: extremely performant, lightweight, premium aluminum construction, excellent screens, great keyboards and trackpads, fingerprint sensors for authentication, thunderbolt ports, magsafe, and so on and so forth. This computer is so good that it’s been very hard to justify buying a device just to tinker, because I knew I wasn’t likely to abandon my beloved Mac anytime soon.

But, as those of you who’ve gone down the Linux rabbit hole will know: the urge to tinker never goes away. So of course, I had to install the only kind of Linux that would run on Apple silicon: Asahi Linux.

I’ve tried all of the compatible ARM-based Linux distributions. The Arch-based Asahi ALARM, Ubuntu Asahi, and the default, Fedora Asahi. As always, Fedora treated me the best. But there are still too many tradeoffs for Asahi to be my daily driver. The video output over USB-C doesn’t work so I can’t use an external monitor (something I do every day), the fingerprint sensor doesn’t work (not a big deal but a shame nonetheless), and, more importantly, there’s just so much software I use for creative work that isn’t ported to Linux (least of all on ARM), and doesn’t have suitable alternatives.

Note

Please don’t @ me about this. I have eagerly tested new versions of Gimp and Krita (they’re great!), am closely watching projects like Graphite (looks awesome!) and Pixi, and even tried to install AffinityOnLinux (it wouldn’t work Asahi). These are not workarounds that I can adapt to for my daily, professional workflow, yet. Plus I already own the Macbook, so why force something like this pre-emptively. That said, I will switch eventually, when I’m ready.

For a few years, I’ve been a proud Steam Deck owner, and so technically, I am still using Linux all the time. When it comes to gaming, I’m team Linux 100% having not dual-booted windows for close to a decade. But it’s just running SteamOS I don’t want to tinker too much with my Deck and risk being unable to game. So I finally did the thing…

I Bought a Thinkpad

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to dump Asahi from my Macbook to reclaim space. As I mentioned above, I do a lot of professional work on this computer and while I try to offload as much as possible to external hard drives and my preferred cloud storage solution, Proton Drive (whose Mac Desktop integration is flawless btw), the laptop’s tiny little 256 GB SSD—especially with 80 GB partitioned for Asahi—is constantly requiring cleanup just to continue operating.

So of course I headed to eBay to find a used Thinkpad to make my official tinkering device. My goal was to spend some time distrohopping through a number of newer distributions that I’ve wanted to test drive (PikaOS, CachyOS, Bluefin), as well as revisit some that I haven’t used much since the early 2020s (Fedora, openSUSE, Pop!OS).

A few days ago, my new Thinkpad arrived. An 8th Generation Intel i5, 16 GB of RAM, a good condition battery… and a 1080p screen. Yeah, the screen is not my favourite part, especially coming from my Macbook, but I told myself, this is just for testing. And besides, video output over USB-C has worked flawlessly on every distro I’ve tried, unlike Asahi on the M2.

I also know that with the announcement of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, as well as Asus’ incredible ProArt Laptops, there are much fairer comparisons I could make if I were actually looking for a replacement for my Macbook.

So anyway, I fired up the laptop and everything seemed to be working perfectly except one thing: it had Windows on it. Nope! I didn’t even go through the install once. I pulled out a thumb drive pre-loaded with the newest version of Fedora Workstation and rebooted into the Live Environment.

The Good, The Bad, and the Cachy

Is speed-dating still a thing that people do? I remember when I was a teenager, my mom gave it a try because it was novel and she was single so why not? It sounded pretty weird to me as a kid and didn’t seem to work for her, so maybe it’s not a great concept.

And yet, for many Linux users, myself included, speed dating is a lifestyle. Only we’re not dating people, but distributions. This past weekend, I did my rounds and it went pretty well… mostly.

Here’s what I installed (or tried to) so far:

• Fedora Workstation
• Fedora Cosmic Spin
• openSUSE Tumbleweed
• CachyOS
• Tonarchy
• PikaOS (Cosmic, Hyprland, Niri, Gnome)
• VanillaOS
• Bluefin

Below are the experiences I had. These are not reviews. They are just anecdotal first impressions on my personal (used, 6 year old) hardware. I’ll do some future blog posts about this as I experiment more and invest more time and effort. And hey if any of you want to sponsor me to buy a Framework Laptop to test as a real Macbook replacement, you can use the tipping buttons at the bottom of this post. All that to say, anything negative you read below is not an indictment of these distros or your own experience with them. I tried them specifically because I think they’re cool. This is what happened next.

Fedora

As I mentioned earlier, I daily drove Fedora for years. I’ve given it to friends and recommended it to befuddled users online, and everyone has the same experience: it just works.

For me and my little Thinkpad this was more or less the same. I booted in, installed Workstation (which is their dumb name for the Gnome flavour) and I was off to the races. Everything worked, updates were easy. I installed my favourite Flatpak store, Bazaar, used it to install some more apps and started to do some basic testing.

I did run into some issues though. Gnome was laggy, especially while opening software and the laptop was getting pretty hot and spinning up the fans during light workloads. I checked for updates and everything was all good, so I’m not sure what caused this. I tried switching to performance mode and that didn’t help. Maybe it was a driver issue, but this is a laptop with a well known older APU from Intel, so I was left perplexed.

Anyway, that was enough for me to move on. Next I tried the Cosmic spin just to see what that’s all about. Despite Pop!OS being the from the same team as Cosmic and thus the default option for it, I plan to avoid it because it’s based on Ubuntu and I prefer my Debian derivatives with just one degree of separation. The Fedora implementation seems to be pretty stock and I can see why some people like it but I’m not sure it’s for me.

openSUSE Tumbleweed

I’ve heard nothing but good things about openSUSE and on paper, it’s pretty much designed for me:

• It’s a well respected, long-running project, managed by a non-profit organization, out of Europe. Check, check, check, check.
• It’s rolling release like Arch, but with a methodology of testing everything before officially adding to repositories, similar to how Fedora does things. They call it “leading edge not bleeding edge” and I respect that.
• Zypper is a no-nonsense package manager, similar to dnf with both obvious commands like zypper install and shorthands like zypper in. And it’s integrated directly with…
• Btrfs, snapshotting, and simple rollbacks enabled by default
• YaST, an openSUSE original, gives you granular control over every aspect of the system via a simple GUI

But unfortunately, the installer is confusing, and on my first attempt I failed the install completely, likely because I tried to do manual partitioning, and thus clearly made some mistake. I did end up succeeding on my second attempt using the default settings, but then every time I tried to run updates, the terminal crashed.

I’ll give it another try in the future because it really does seem to be a cool project. I’m also very intrigued by their upcoming immutable rolling release distro Aeon and will for sure want to give that a try when it releases officially.

CachyOS

From everything I’ve watched, read, and heard, CachyOS is probably for me. It takes what I’ve always loved about Arch-based distros like Manjaro and Endeavour (previously Antergos), and makes it even more polished, performant, and cool.

I know that when I can figure out how to get CachyOS to work, on this laptop or another, I’ll daily drive it for at least a few months. But, sadly, as you may have guessed, I couldn’t get it to work. I tried installing it with Hyprland and the installer failed at the end. I tried Niri, same result. I tried Gnome, same result. I tried KDE (which I personally dislike using, sorry to say), and it failed too.

So for now, I have nothing interesting to say about Cachy.

Omarch… err, Tonarchy

Listen I know that a lot of people reading this will want to tell me I should try Omarchy. I’ve followed the project from the very beginning. I think I may have been one of the very first people to post about it on Bluesky. But after another user pointed me to some of DHH’s reprehensible blog posts and tweets, I decided that I’m not willing to personally promote the project, deleted my initial post, and haven’t mentioned it, except in passing since.

I think what Omarchy does as a concept is cool. I think that the way that this project has brought together a lot of open source contributors, inspired some big donations to open source developers, and pushed the boundaries and pace of Arch and Hyprland development is all laudable. I don’t fault anyone for using it, and I don’t believe that doing so is equatable to approval of DHH’s worldview. But it’s not for me.

I did want to give an “opinionated Hyprland distribution” a taste though and I’m a big fan of Tony Banter’s videos on YouTube, so I decided to try out Tonarchy. It’s an extremely lightweight, user-friendly Omarchy-like installer of pre-riced Arch Linux with his own Oxidized Window Manager (oxwm) or, if you prefer, there’s an XFCE spin too.

I installed Tonarchy and had no issues getting the system up and running and following his video tutorial was able to tweak things to look how I wanted. What’s even crazier is that it was using the least ram I’ve ever seen an operating system use. I’m talking a fraction of a percent. But I had a pretty major issue that I couldn’t seem to resolve. I couldn’t connect to the wifi. And none of the tools I would have needed to connect from terminal seemed to be installed. And I couldn’t install them without the internet.

Maybe it was just user error, and maybe I was just hungry, but I got so frustrated I decided to just move on for now. But, Tony, oxwm seems awesome. I will definitely revisit your projects in the future.

PikaOS

This is where things start to get fun. PikaOS is a relatively new project focused on user-friendliness and gaming optimizations, and while I first thought it was a fly-by-night addition to the Linux space, I now have nothing but good things to say about this newcomer.

My first inclination that I should try it was seeing TheBlackDon’s videos on YouTube. This is a relatively experienced tiling window manager user, who moved from Cachy (if I remember correctly) to Pika and hasn’t looked back.

What I’ve seen in those videos and elsewhere online has given me a lot of confidence that Pika is worth checking out, and now that I have, I get it.

Installing PikaOS was dead simple. I tried all four flavours and they all worked, with installation taking just few minutes each time. I had the same issue that I had on Fedora where Gnome a bit slow/laggy but I was still thinking this might be a hardware issue. Cosmic, I tried again, and while Pika’s styling of this burgeoning DE was cute, I still don’t think it’s for me.

I also tried Niri which is really interesting, but I couldn’t quite make it work for me. I think that was 100% a skill issue though and I’m going to revisit Niri soon when I’ve watched and read some more tutorials.

Hyprland was fine. I didn’t love everything about the styling Pika added and I kept getting a brief error on login, but it didn’t seem to stop anything from actually working.

I saw some good videos from both TheBlackDon and Tony that made me think MangoWC might be exactly what I’m looking for as a sort of middle ground between Niri and Hyprland.

But if you like Cosmic or Niri, want to try Hyprland, or have hardware that plays better with their version of Gnome than mine did, you should definitely check out PikaOS. It’s awesome!

It’s based on Debian Sid, which is similar to openSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora Rawhide. It’s got Btrfs, snapshotting, and rollbacks all set up, like openSUSE, and it uses the same performance gaming tweaks found in distros like CachyOS, Nobara, and Bazzite.

It’s definitely not all hype.

VanillaOS

I also wanted to explore some immutable distributions and keeping with the Debian theme, I figured why not start with VanillaOS. This relatively new distribution takes the best of Fedora’s Atomic Spins and improves upon them, in a somewhat PikaOS-like way.

You’ve got the same seamless, modern installation process as Pika. Performance optimizations that benefit gaming in particular, but you also got an immutable configuration where each update is a fresh image, and you can rollback to the previous one if anything breaks.

Like all immutable distros, software is generally not installed from a distribution’s repository, but rather by Flatpak or other containerized solutions. This is extremely secure, and Vanilla claims that it is not at the expense of customization.

My experience with VanillaOS was pretty much flawless. The install went perfectly, everything worked, the laptop was running super cool, I was able to get all my software installed via Flatpak without any issues. I tweaked Gnome to my liking, adding the Forge extension for autotiling windows, and changing the close-window shortcut to alt-Q, and area screenshots (via Gradia) to alt-shift-4 to help with my Mac muscle memory. I installed LocalSend, Krita, and Planify (a great to-do app that’s like a cross between Things and Apple Reminders) and I spent a few hours doing everyday computer stuff, which it handled without issue.

The only thing that I couldn’t get to work properly is my favourite software store: Bazaar. I wish every distro, especially those which rely exclusively on Flatpaks, would use this as the default. It’s intuitive, clean, fast, and well organized. Bazaar is made by UniversalBlue, the team behind the SteamOS-like, immutable distro, Bazzite and is the default on all of their distros.

So I thought that might be as good a reason as any to do my next hop.

Bluefin

UniversalBlue makes four distributions on their namesake, in-house, immutable desktop framework: Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin, and uCore. The first one, you’ve surely heard of. It’s made for handheld and home theatre style gaming setups, but would also be at home on a gaming focused desktop computer.

Aurora and Bluefin are more general purpose distributions, leaning towards being used by developers, but certainly suitable to everyday users as well. The main difference is that Aurora runs KDE and Bluefin runs Gnome. The other option, uCore, is for servers, so I don’t have much else to say about it at the moment.

My experience with Bluefin has been similar to my experience with VanillaOS, which is to say, it’s effectively perfect for my needs. Install went smoothly, no hardware issues, and like VanillaOS, the subtle Gnome-lag I had experienced on Pika and Fedora was non-existent. Unlike VanillaOS, Bazaar was installed by default and worked flawlessly.

So the tl;dr is that for the moment, I have Bluefin installed on my Thinkpad, and intend to daily drive it for a little while. I still intend to use my Macbook for my consequential work for the foreseeable future, which gives me the freedom to tinker and distrohop on this new laptop and not worry about breaking things.

So, you can expect to see future blog posts with updates on this subject. Speaking of which…

Want More Content Like This?

This is a relatively new blog, and I don’t know exactly what I want to write about yet. I’m not going to force anything, but I’d love to know what posts of mine you enjoy. You can show me that you like a certain subject by sharing my posts; by commenting (respectfully please) on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Farcaster; by subscribing via ATProtocol blogs services like pckt or Leaflet; and, if you’re so inclined, by supporting me with the tipping buttons at the bottom of this post. I’ve chosen to only accept cryptocurrency (I explain why in this post), so if that’s something you avoid, I understand. Don’t feel like you need to support me financially. You can always show support in the other ways I mentioned.

If people do support though, maybe I’ll have a Framework Laptop or a gaming desktop, or something else to put Linux on and write all about.

That sounds like fun to me.