Nothing wrong with that! I prefer Inter for nearly all UIs these days, but I still think Segoe UI looks better than GNOME’s current default of Cantarell.

Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.

Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.

Since adopting a Flatpak and containerized workflow, the choice of distribution matters a lot less to me now than it did 10 years ago.

The majority of apps that I use everyday can be run from any host. And I can install fedora, arch, debian, or whatever I want as a container, whenever I want it, without any thought to my host system.

Ideally, Flatpak’s UX will continue to improve, and upstream app devs will continue to adopt it as an official support channel, which will improve overall security and confidence of the platform. Image-based, atomic distros will be further streamlined, allowing for even more easily interchangeable host images. At that point, traditional distros will be little more than an opinionated collection of command line tools and programming environments.

Your fstab file can remain unchanged and still fail, if the drive or user identifiers have changed unexpectedly. It depends on how you’ve configured your fstab entries, which is why it’s helpful to share them. In future, no one will be able to offer much assistance without seeing the entry details. Either way, glad you were able to get it sorted!

Can you read/write to the disks as root? If so, then something has likely gone sideways with your fstab entry. For example, the device name, order, or UID/GID may have changed, depending on how you’ve configured the entry.

It’s difficult to assist much more without seeing the contents of /etc/fstab.

I used DDG for the first link, but then searched Google with a portion of the error message in quotes. Either way, I’m glad it sorted itself out!

Sounds like a server-side issue to me. Found something similar from 6 months ago…and another here.

Hah any time, man! Your work and YT vids are what really got me hooked me on Silverblue and the cloud native workflow! I’ll never look at computing the same way again lol.

Hah nice, I’d never heard of this one but there’s been plenty of times I’ve wanted to make a quick loop and didn’t want to fuss with it in ffmpeg directly. Will definitely check it out!

I still haven’t taken any of the uBlue images for a spin, but I sincerely appreciate what they’re doing and Jorge has been the perfect champion for the project.

I like to use upstream as much as possible. Partly to minimize breakage and complexity, but also for the increased security and overall focus of resources on a given project. That said, I have no doubt they’re awesome builds and have helped win a lot of folks over to this way of computing!

I totally get it as I’m a tinkerer too, but these days I spend most of that energy on webdev, house projects, thrifting/restoring stuff, etc. If only there was more time in a day lol.

There’s plenty of freedom to tweak local themes with atomic distros, as your home dir itself is entirely mutable and can be changed to your liking.

As to why Fedora/Arch… I love Arch and have used it daily for almost 20 years. I was an Arch dev once upon a time (Judd/Aaron era), and I designed the logo and web branding in use today. The project means a lot to me.

The inherent benefits of atomic systems caught my attention a couple years ago, and Fedora’s implementation won me over.

My hope is that Arch eventually (and officially) adopts a similar approach as these image-based systems become mainstream, at which point I’ll happily be the first in line for testing!

Fedora Silverblue (atomic GNOME) and Kinoite (atomic KDE) have been solid for both work and gaming. System maintenance is largely seamless and automatic once configured. I still use Arch daily, but only in the terminal (distrobox and containers).

Going AMD is so worth it too, I have zero regrets swapping my RTX 2080s for RX 6800 XTs. Secure boot, Wayland, no fuss updates. Couldn’t be happier.

You mentioned needing customization…not sure what you’re hoping for there, but the atomic distros allow for plenty of userspace tweaks. It’s the system-level stuff, like boot and greeter themes, that require a bit more work to implement. My time is too precious to fuss about that stuff these days.

There is no one-size-fits-all, but for fits most, you’re looking at KDE’s Konsole or GNOME’s new Terminal (formerly Ptyxis). Everything else is going to be niche, with special use cases. What are your specific needs?

I do this as well and for the most part it’s been fine. It’s handy to have options and, even for apps that do run under Windows, it’s often less hassle to just fire up the VM.

Fair points. I’ve only ever taken Mint for a quick spin and that was a decade ago. I just see it constantly recommended as one of the most user-friendly distros, thus the maybe recommendation.

Personally, I’m all in on Fedora Atomic for my hosts and (mostly) Arch in my containers.

I would maybe add Linux Mint to that list, but otherwise you’re spot on. Fedora and Ubuntu are the easiest and most robust systems for novice computer users.

Obviously, lightweight is open to some interpretation but Silverblue can be made very lightweight by simply uninstalling the default flatpaks. You’ll be left with a very basic GNOME shell and greeter, without any of the common GNOME extras. From there you could easily install your own window manager, greeter, and whatever apps you need.

If all else fails, you can always spin up a Windows VM. I generally keep one around for tasks like this (or complex Excel workbooks).

If you’ve no prior experience with Linux, I’d say just try using it. For the average computer user, the overall experience will be very similar to Windows or Mac.

Go easy on yourself, and don’t try to do/learn everything all at once. Just use the system like you would any other. Once you’re comfortable with the overall experience, you can then tackle more complex stuff if/when you feel the need.

Edit: Just wanted to add that Fedora, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu are all solid choices for beginners.