How is it for software availability?

Assuming you’re asking for NixOS, it’s basically the best; I’m simply unaware of any repo that’s bigger.

While the landscape of ‘atomic’ distros may look thriving, we can distill the amount of mature projects to just NixOS, Guix System and Fedora Atomic (and their derivatives).

Most of the other projects found e.g. here are unfortunately not worth your time in most cases.

As for which one to go with, that definitely depends on what you desire out of it (in alphabetical order):

• Do you want something that’s relatively easy to start out with? Then go with Fedora Atomic (or a derivative^[1]). From my personal testing, this one also seems to be the friendliest in terms of taking away many footguns.
• If two of the following strike a chord with ya, then you should heavily consider Guix Systems:
  • Enjoying/liking^[2] Lisp
  • Being passionate about F(L)OSS
  • Enjoying NixOS as a model, but being discontent with something^[3] that happens to be (better) (re)solved on Guix Systems
• NixOS is the OG^[4]. As such, there’s a lot of cruft. But within that mess, somehow, ironically, it holds the potential for setting up the cleanest OS. As you can guess, without a shred of doubt, it is the most mature and most powerful out of the bunch. So, if you’ve got exotic places you’d like to go with your distro, then -in a lot of cases- this is the only viable destination.

older computer

What are the specs?

Is there a way to just reset and do everything over like by repartitioning and installing something like Fedora or Ubuntu?

You mean wipe everything on your HDD/SSD and install something that can make use of all of its storage capacity? That’s basically included on every distro installer.

I can’t get Ethernet or my VPN working

That’s definitely not expected behaviour.

I want to be able to download “app” “installers” like you do with PC or MacOS.

What do you mean? Is it either one of the following? (Perhaps both are fine with ya?)

• Download software from a website and install it?
• Use a app/software store application in which you can find and install apps/software? This is basically what’s found on modern phones.

What do y’all think of Zorin, should I still migrate to something more ubiquitous and longer-running?

Zorin OS should be fine~ish. The problem with asking the community is that they’re often more interested in laying out their favorites rather than what would be closest to the objectively best option 😅. If, however, your problems with ethernet persist on Zorin OS while another distro’s live ISO doesn’t have that problem, then I suppose it would only make sense to switch.

Yup! It’s basically a slimmed down version of how Bazzite achieves ‘immutability’ - allowing it be very robust and pleasant to work with. And while it does sport GNOME, their optimizations enable it to run gracefully on a laptop with just 4 GB of RAM.

That depends.

If this is a Linux guest on a Linux host and both are just your average distros, then it’s fine~ish. It’s not 100% safe as some malware is able to escape a VM, see this for a recent example of this.

Doing your shady stuff within a disposable air-gapped^[1] VM on a RISC-V powered Sculpt OS host should be pretty safe, though.

in general: for my personal daily use pc. I download 🏴‍☠️ files and software for websites around the internet, so it would be nice have an antivirus

Aight. Understood. Thank you for the clarification!

So…, now it becomes a question of how paranoid security-sensitive you are 😅. I suppose relying on a distro with pretty decent security defaults (like e.g. Fedora or openSUSE) makes sense for a start. Furthermore, definitely commit to best practices^[1]. As for the scanning part, other comments have already touched on that.

If the PC you’re doing this contains sensitive information OR you’re not satisfied with the provided “probably good enough” solution, then consider going “the extra mile”. Which would involve the use of specialized OSes, relying on VMs and whatnot. But I digress…

in specific: i want to self host services in my home server, so i want it to be secure and protected

Unfortunately, I’m not confident talking on servers specifically. It’s simply not something I’ve put serious thoughts to yet. I hope someone else will touch on that 😉.

OP, I’ll be honest with ya: if you’re looking for something akin to M$ Defender but on Desktop Linux (and free), you ain’t gonna find it.

A quick look at your Lemmy history suggests that you’re security-conscious. In that context, it’s worth noting that ‘Linux’ does provide you. However, depending on your situation and/or threat model, this might come at the cost of expertise.

If you never download random stuff from the internet, then your average distro might be sufficient as long as you commit to the most basic set of best practices.

However, if you do download random stuff from the internet OR if your situation and/or threat model warrants a more conscious approach, then things might change substantially.

But before subjecting you to Qubes OS, we’d have to know more about your situation. So, first of all, could you elaborate on your use case of ClamAV? Or, perhaps even what you intend to do in general?

FWIW, Lenspect is not capable of selecting a folder and scanning all of its contents^[1] (yet). For that (and more), there is vt-cli (source); maintained by (more or less) the same people that brought us VirusTotal. List of repos in which it’s found.

I’d argue it’s mostly polarizing; proponents love it, while detractors hate it. A nuanced discussion is what we’re missing…

It looks like the best options for immutable have a learning curve or time commitment attached (e.g. NixOS). For a daily driver computer it might be worth the trouble to learn, but in this case I decided to just go with standard Fedora XFCE for now.

Fam, don’t sleep on Endless OS.

VanillaOS and OpenSUSE immutable ones use BTRFS snapshots dont they?

For openSUSE’s atomic offerings, you’re correct. Vanilla OS is a bit more nuanced, though. I don’t quite recall how they did it on their original images. But since Orchid, there is a reliance on OCI images for its updates. Note that bootc is also contingent upon OCI images, which is why I made the comparison earlier. They behave so similar to one another, that Vanilla OS’ Vib can be used (without too much trouble) to create Fedora Atomic images.

As for the usage of Btrfs snapshots on Vanilla OS, I think it doesn’t quite need it because it relies on lvm thin provisioning instead for its ABRoot. However, an attempt to verify this by installing it within a VM failed spectacularly and I don’t think the blame is on me 😅…

Sorry, perhaps I should have been more clear.

It was meant strictly in the sense of how much it burdens the system performance-wise. So, in other words, using nix is easier on your system’s resources than rpm-ostree (or bootc) is; at least, that has been my experience.

In regards to breaking, I’m not sure whether one outdoes the other. Though, I suppose that nix -by design- would inch this out. But this is basically an ‘internal dispute’ between the crème de la crème; as rpm-ostree/bootc basically outdoes any other distro package manager that’s not named nix or guix.

While I absolutely adore everything rpm-ostree/bootc, I do think operations involving it are relatively heavy; at least compared to what else is out there.

Depending on your (in)tolerance, you might therefore consider opting for something else, instead. Assuming that this list does a considerable job at presenting your options, I’ll try to provide input on some of the more mainstream ones:

• openSUSE’s offerings. AFAIK, it is lighter. Heck, I’d reckon you might not even be able to distinguish it from its traditional counterpart; Tumbleweed. However, its ecosystem is still very much in its infancy. Hence, I don’t recall any of their offerings that don’t rely on GNOME/KDE-Plasma. There used to be Project Greybeard, but it’s far from lively… As for Aeon (i.e. GNOME version) and Kalpa (i.e. KDE Plasma version), they haven’t had a general availability release yet.
• NixOS. I have heard good things regarding how well it does on low-end PCs. However, FWIW, my own testing portrays a different story: I once had an update that resulted in a lot of compilation and my machine was struggling quite a bit. The same machine that handles Fedora Atomic quite gracefully*. Perhaps that was a fluke, but I wanted to point it out. I’d argue nix does handle operations more gracefully than rpm-ostree/bootc on average, though.
• Guix System. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this outdoes NixOS in terms of how gracefully it operates on a low-end system. This is mostly on vibes, though.
• Endless OS. If you liked Bazzite, but want something lighter, then this might be just that. It relies on ostree only and thus doesn’t have the heavier operations from rpm-ostree/bootc. The goals of the foundation behind it align with enabling low-end hardware. This is reflected in their system reqs. Note that GNOME is still relatively heavy, but you should be served well even on just 4 GB of RAM.
• ChromeOS Flex. For completeness’ sake, if you’re otherwise okay with this, then I suppose it’s another option worth considering. FWIW, there’s also FydeOS (and perhaps others).
• VanillaOS. Does something similar to bootc ever since its Orchid release. So, it’s probably not that light. Furthermore, I got many questions regarding the health of its ecosystem. This used to be another serious contender, but I’m afraid it might have missed the boat…
• GNOME OS and KDE Linux. While not production-ready yet, these will definitely be interesting in the long run.
• aerynOS. Another project that’s not production-ready yet.
• Nitrux. Definitely one of the more interesting ones. It has been around for quite a while now, but I’ve yet to come across someone that dailies it.

Having said all of that, the gist is basically that atomic distros are still relatively new. As such, I can only recommend Endless OS, Guix System and NixOS. Note that the latter two are rabbit holes, though.

A couple of years ago, I used both of them briefly and GNOME simply provided the more polished experience back then.

In time, I came to dislike the look/design of KDE apps.

So when the time came I wanted to ditch GNOME because I was sick of its extensions ecosystem, I didn’t even consider KDE Plasma. Instead, I tried out Sway and eventually settled on COSMIC.

Thank you for reply.

It has been my pleasure! Thank you for replying back :) .

Yes, I would be ok with A as well, but I am learning things slowly to get to that point.

While I absolutely respect that attitude, it’s worth noting that literally none of the hardened and respected distros are a one-man show. Which is my way of saying that unless you pursuit a career in cyber security, you’re probably better served elsewhere.

So B for now would be great.

Aight. Excellent.

But it seems like OpenBSD might not be great for running VMs

IIRC, it depends. If a TTY/terminal-interface is all you need, then vmm handles that pretty well. But if you’d like to run applications that have their own graphical interfaces, then OpenBSD’s solution might not be adequate. At least, it wasn’t the last time I did a thorough check on the distro.

Could not find much info for virtualization support on HardenedBSD though. Not sure how well bhyve work there, but it seems like VMs might not work well or be performant enough on either of them.

IIRC, bhyve is pretty good actually. Performance-wise, it is good enough to do gaming even. As HardenedBSD is simply hardened FreeBSD, I don’t have a serious reason to assume it ain’t able to do that.

On that note, I want to mention quBSD as an interesting project. It kinda aims to bridge the gap between Qubes OS and FreeBSD. Its developer hasn’t released anything yet, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Having said all of that, I want to state clearly that there is a disconnect between what’s out there and what you want:

• Alpine is pretty decent security-wise, but -like literally most other distros out there- security is somewhat of an afterthought. Like, unless it is a platform-wide accepted ordeal, it will not consider pro-active hardening. This also more-or-less applies to the likes of Artix, Gentoo and Void. So, it relies on your expertise for serious hardening.
• OpenBSD’s vmm doesn’t do GUIs.
• Kicksecure and secureblue while being Linux’ finest security-wise, do rely on systemd. Same applies to NixOS derivatives like SécurixOS and Spectrum OS.
• HardenedBSD. Which, actually looks pretty fabulous otherwise, may not support flatpak. Don’t quote me on this, though*.
• Qubes OS’ system requirements are too high, as you point out elsewhere.

So…, what does that leave us with :P ?

Is an amalgamation between sixos and nix-mineral in which you try to port all systemd-related hardenings the best we can do?

However, I’d argue that a possible eventuality might yield us an actual winner.

Recently, Flatpak’s maintainers/developers noted work on Flatpak Next; a successor to Flatpak, if you will. The hope is that it’ll eliminate some of Flatpak’s glaring issues. However, they also announced that it will depend on systemd.

Granted, the eventual thing we’ll receive might not depend on systemd at all. Heck, even if it will, perhaps some distro maintainers will provide a workaround OR just keep on relying on the old flatpak that might get new maintainers. So, there’s absolutely no reason to go full-on FUD right now.

Yet, an out does exist that doesn’t depend on anything of the above; simply by not requiring flatpak support. In which case, HardenedBSD it is. FWIW, with access to VMs, you can also continue to enjoy your flatpaks through a VM. Which, literally happens to be the simplest fix to salvage an “almost”.

P.S. if you didn’t figure it out yet, your query is something I asked myself a couple of years ago 😅.

P.P.S. I forgot about Chimera Linux. I’m not well-versed into it, but perhaps another interesting one to consider. At least alongside Alpine, Artix, Gentoo and Void.

I suppose it’s a good time as any to try it out :) .

FWIW, I’ve been on (a derivative of) Fedora Atomic for over four years now. There’s a learning curve if you’d like to translate some of your existing workflows, but it has overall been a very smooth experience. Like, the last time something broke was with the mesa mess-ups over three years ago. And the beautiful thing with Bazzite is that it can protect its user base from such instances. The how-part would dwarf the existing text, so I digress (for now 😜).

Huh? Last time I checked, SteamOS literally removed user-installed (non-flatpak) packages.

I agree that it’s a pity that the first couple of flatpak packages take up a lot of space for what they are. But that shouldn’t bother most modern systems.

Ah okay, thanks for clarifying!

FYI, DistroWatch isn’t a very reliable metric for gauging the user base of any given distro. Heck, strictly speaking, I’m unaware of any metric that does this any justice besides the opt-out DNF Count Me found on Fedora-based distros. And we will use exactly that to discredit DistroWatch!

So, Fedora (1112^[1]) has put out a number (relatively) recently; 961k users. And Bazzite (770) outright displays it on their website; 90.8k users. Like, Fedora is roughly 10 times as big as Bazzite. But their respective DistroWatch rankings don’t quite reflect that.

I don’t agree with the sentiment that Linux Mint is underrated either. As you note, it is quite popular and is mentioned a lot in the discourse.

However, I don’t think that CachyOS and Linux Mint are the most popular distros; that undoubtedly goes to Ubuntu. And, if anything, I’d think that Linux Mint is more popular than CachyOS.

Yet, if we’d limit it to the distros used by gamers, then CachyOS probably does take the crown for most used distro (aside from SteamOS). At least, there are metrics that suggest as such.

Sorry for the late reply

No worries fam 🙂.

thank you for taking your time!

It has been my pleasure 🙂.

I have “defaulted” back to Artix, having fixed the NIC issue.

Glad to hear that you were able to return back to your home.

And I agree, Gentoo is what I dream of being able to handle, but all the USE flags KILLED me when I set it up for the first time a month or so ago. xD I do want to get back to it at some point though.

Good mindset! I’m sure you’ll manage whenever you get back to it 😉.