 About a year ago. I took a look at fedora quinoa in a long-term review I used it for about four months and I would not call that review positive at all in fact, I went so far as to call it a buggy beta-like mess and a lot of the blame for that Bugginess I did place on KDE, but I wasn't kind to the distro at all I used it for a long time and you could tell right at the beginning of the video that I was just fed up with that distro In fact, so far that I actually had uninstalled it before I even recorded the video I just wanted it off my computer now it has been like I said over a year since that video and With the prompting of George Castro the gentleman behind A lot of the mutable stuff that goes on in the fedora ecosystem So he's behind you blue and a couple other really big really interesting projects. He asked me Several months ago now to take a look at the you blue version of fedora quinoa and I have Had it installed on my laptop for several months. In fact, when I started Fedora 37 was the primary version of quinoa white now we're on 38 And I'm presuming that 39 will be here pretty soon So I've had it installed on my laptop for quite a while and I have some thoughts about it And I will say this first just before we even jump in But actually before I say anything if you leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it would really help the channel But the first thing that I will say is that when I made my long-term review of quinoa white before I had a problem and my problem was that I really didn't get immutable distros I Understood some of the technical aspects of it But you could tell that I'd only spent you know a few months with it And it wasn't my daily driver and I really didn't understand what the hell it was going on And I didn't understand why an immutable distribution was good You could tell like I went through and rewatched this video I'll actually show you the video so you can see this was my video and pay attention By the way to this particular error. We're going to talk about that again here in a few minutes, but you know I You know I you made that video and I just I didn't know what immutable distros, you know really were good for And I will say that a year removed from that. I am a little bit more well versed on immutable distros I've used them more. I understand them them more. I understand the limitations and the benefits all that stuff I understand it more and I Not going to go so far as to say that I'm an expert. I am not one at all Still an eternal noob always will be one. So just We'll get that out of the way, but I understand them more. So I think that this long-term review that I'm doing today Even if we're not going to call it that will at least be a little bit more informed than the previous ones So with that out of the way, let's actually take a look at my laptop So I have a fancy dancing new capture card and I'm going to show you My screen on my laptop. So this is me doing stuff on my laptop Hopefully this actually works and as you can see this is fedora 38 kino white. That's the most recent you blue version Of kino white. I've like I said, I started with fedora 37. I've rebased to 38 uh Probably a couple months ago at this point now It's been quite a while since I rebased to 38 and I've been using it on this laptop ever since and overall Let's just start off with some of the positive things I will say this that it is much less buggy overall Than it was when I did my first long-term review. That's absolutely 100 true I had fewer issues when it came to actual getting katie plasma to be very stable And i'm happy about this. In fact, i'm using the wailin session of plasma right now and it works fine And it's you know displaying the output onto another computer fine. It will do screen capture just fine It's worked very good. In fact, I've done most of my python course learning on this laptop I have this code here and all the stuff hanging out on another activity And it's just worked out really really well. It's overall it's been a very very stable experience Way better than it was the last time I looked at kino white So I have to question how much of that is the fact that this is the you blue version And how much of it is that it's not the actual official kino white version I don't know and I can't answer that question for you guys But just to know that the you blue version at least so far has been way way better In terms of stability than the original kino white was when I reviewed it over a year ago So just putting that out there in terms of stability because its ability was my primary complaint when it came to Kino white last time this time much better now I will say this and this is a big proviso is that they're different computers So the review I did last year was done on my main machine with multiple monitors And as you guys know, I always have problems with katie on this main machine This time I've been doing it on this laptop And that could explain some of the differences. I don't know that for sure But it's something that I want to be transparent about they are different computers So that's that now let's move on to just one thing Now if you remember I told you to pay attention to this here error Right and I go back here because One of the things that I spent a lot of time talking about in that initial review was that plasma Had some issues when it came to compatibility with the immutable file system And you always got an error when you're trying to install a global theme So one of the things that I had hoped was that that would actually fix So if we go to settings here, we go to appearance and then we go down to Install new theme and then we restart this to Highest rated first and then we scroll down just it doesn't really matter Which one we use we just go ahead and install this one here It doesn't matter And then it'll do this thing and then it'll ask for your password It'll do that here in a second. It will take a little bit So you'll enter your password and enter and then you get the exact same error as a year ago It's their different version fedora. So the fedora that I used in the review was 36 I believe this is 38 and we're still having the same plasma problem that we had on a year ago So why that is I still don't know there's something to do here I'm guessing and this is just me being you know 100 guessing is that there's some kind of incompatibility between Plasma and actually using this on an immutable distro. I'm guessing that that's the issue How you'd go about getting around it because I did it actually install One theme. I don't know how I did it. That was ages ago Actually, it's gonna it's still technically going on in the background and then you get the the error again and Eventually, maybe it'll pop up. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't In fact, I've only had it pop up as installed one time with the Dracula theme I don't know what's going on there. It doesn't make a lot of sense But that's honestly the only bug that I came across in terms of using this day to day It was a big bug because I liked to customize my plasma And the fact that I wasn't able to do so at least much I did finally get the Dracula theme to kind of work But it's not all there. There's some things that are blatantly missing They're using the wrong icon theme for whatever reason. I'm not sure why that happens But it's there. But honestly, that's the biggest bug that I noticed So the thing that I need to talk about today is the differences that I've noticed between The stock kina white image that you would get by downloading the iso from fedora and rebasing A silver blue install to kina white from a u blue image, which is what I've done here So this is a u blue image of kina white now if we go to firefox down here I actually have loaded up all of the images that u blue offers and they offer Way more than they did the last time I look at u blue. There's a ton of them here And a lot of them are duplicates that that are meant for different scenarios. So whether or not you're using You know nvidia drivers or you're looking for something that's a little bit different, you know, a lot of them have Specific use cases for specific hardware specific development purposes and stuff like that So they have a lot of different desktop environments and use case scenarios in terms of Images that they offer now. I'm obviously using the kina white one Which is down here and they offer quite a few of these and these are the ones that I've used And this is how you update from the 37 to 38 you take this and you just rebase it And This computer actually started off on a stock image of silver blue Then rebased into the u blue version of kina white So the question I had at the beginning and one of the reasons why I was confused as to why George Castro asked me to take a look at this like what's the difference, right? It's just kina white That's what I thought it was but that's actually not true. And if we actually take a look And I'm going to switch here actually to my main computer just because that's where I have it open If we go here we can actually see that there are some differences between the regular stock version of kina white and what u blue has to offer so The one that I really have found myself using the most and if you've watched my channel for You know a few months you'll notice that i'm that i'm a big big fan of distro box And one of the things that they do is they install distro box By default so if I actually switch back to the the laptop here and I open up a terminal We can actually do distro box enter arch like so And then now you'll see I have an arch Linux distro box. I've been using that for certain things And you guys know I love distro box. So I like that particular change that was really nice to to see They also have an I hate I'm sorry to switch back and forth between this on you guys I'm still getting used to the whole having two machines in front of me kind of it's kind of weird But they also had add in all of the codex that you need in order to make fedora work with Basically everything Stock standard fedora does not come with that you have to add those things yourself So every ublue image already has this there's a whole bunch of udeb rules and service units So that allows if I am correct on this and I may or may not be again eternal noob But basically that allows for better hardware support for peripherals and stuff and probably more than that, right? The only times I've ever had to mess around with udeb rules is when I tried to get a Weird piece of hard hard work accessory to actually work. So when I was using a Not a steam deck, but a stream deck I had to add add udeb rules in order to get that to work So so the ublue version of fedora kina white comes with some udeb rules there They've also included a way to configure supported mice be a piper various other tools that they have a complete list of package to describe It also sets automatic staging for updates for the system now I think what this was supposed to mean was that updates happen Automatically then they say that for flap hacks as well Now I like I've been using this for months And admittedly my laptop is not on all the time. So I'm assuming that that has something to do with it But I never not once saw an automatic update I had to do them all myself now Maybe there's something that you have to switch on in order for that to work Not sure never actually looked into it because I didn't see this until You know, I was well into the to the project, but Not sure what I did wrong there But supposedly automatic staging and updates to flat packs happen twice a day So if we go back to the actual laptop here and we get out of the distro box The biggest differences that I've saw is that it feels like a more complete package It comes with a better version of the containerized system distro box then Fedora the regular fedora kina white does which comes with toolbox I've always preferred distro box over toolbox. It just feels more complete more user friendly the documentation for Distro box is better than toolboxes So I prefer that change and overall it's just felt like a more stable In coherent system than the stock kina white image Now the one thing I can't say is whether or not the stock kina white image has gotten better from when I tried it You know a year ago. I don't know. I haven't tried it. So I'm not sure But just using the ublue version of kina white for the last several months on this laptop Has been a very good experience Now one of the things that I should talk about That I was not able to talk about in the first video I made about this Is what immutable distros are good for and specifically what I've experienced running this as an immutable distro so as I've learned more about Immutability and all this stuff one of the things that I've come to realize Is that if you want a linux distribution that is really Literally set it and forget it you want an immutable distro My laptop has been has often goes through periods of Disuse so sometimes I don't even touch it for Six weeks, you know, it just sits there. I don't do anything with it You know it the battery dies eventually and you know I have to come charge it or whatever and then I do all the updates And sometimes that happened that happened a couple times while kina white was on here Because of my disuse I was always a little worried about having to come back to a crap ton of updates. Now you guys got to remember I come from A history of using rolling release distros and I've also used fedora in the past So I know that if you leave fedora for quite some time without updating it You're going to eventually find that there's a ton of updates to be had And for the most part it usually goes just fine even with regular stock standard fedora If you leave your laptop for a couple months and do an update when you come back to it It's probably going to be work just fine It's not arch linux and the fact that you can't go that long without updating something without having some problems It's not that bad But still, you know, I was a little worried But my worry was for nothing because it worked just fine when I came back fedora 38 was available And a whole bunch of flat packs were able to be updated The one thing that I will say about this is that and this is just a Generalized thing about apparently silver blue and kina white together It is that the updating mechanism at least the way that I understand it is kind of not together So if you do rpm os tree upgrade You're going to see that your image is somewhat updated But it doesn't catch everything which is disappointing And you'd think that it would but it doesn't so what I found actually was the best way to update your entire system Is actually to go to discover And when you go open up discover then there's an update tab here down here at the bottom it will say update And you can do all of your updates here now That did take a long time and I will say this that every time I did an update whether it was rpm Os tree upgrade or if it was through discovery my computer sounded like it was Going to start flying away You know because the fans were just absolutely insane while it was doing that I don't know if that's an experience. You'll have if you run it on a laptop But I will say it got very very loud and very very hot That that's I haven't really had that on any other distro So that's just something that I thought I thought would mention and I know I've kind of Meandered away from the immutable aspect of all this stuff, but I'm going to talk about it more here in a second But you guys should be 100% used to me just rambling through my videos By now if you've watched my videos before so anyways the update mechanism does seem a little bit You know all over the place So just if you're going to use quinoa use discover because it's going to encompass everything on the system Not only regular application updates, but also it'll get you to fedora updates and What I was actually surprised about something that I hadn't realized that the kd devs had back baked in Was the ability for them to do firmware updates. So you can actually see I have a uef i Update there now it also did a bios update and an intel firmware update All that stuff did it worked really really well It was very surprised because that doesn't happen on every Laptop and it worked actually fairly well on this one. So I was quite happy with it So like I said if you want a distribution that is really really set it and forget it And you don't have to worry about having to constantly work You know pay attention to where the upgrades are and all that stuff an immutable distro is where it's at It really does work well for just putting it on a laptop and it just Working I've been very very very surprised at that because when I heard about the whole immutable thing And we first started learning about it, you know as a linux community One of the things I heard and one of the things that I kind of understood to be true was that it took away some of the freedoms that you had to Mess around with your system because because the read the the file system the base root file system is Read only right. You're not supposed to mess around with it and that Affects what you can install it affects what you can customize it affects what you can mess around with all this stuff, right? It just it feels more limiting than a traditional linux distro But as I've used the immutable aspect of kina white for the last few months and on several other tries with immutable distros One of the things that I've come to realize is that if you use the tools that they provide you None of the immutable aspect of your distro actually means anything to you So if you use distro box or toolbox, it doesn't really matter And you use that to install the things that you need to install that would normally have to be installed at a root level You're going to be good to go because that's what you're supposed to do You're supposed to use these containerized environments like that's just rocks or toolbox to Do your stuff in those environments instead of messing around and installing it on your base system That's what those containerized packages using podman or docker are supposed to do That's why they're provided for you. And like I said, I prefer distro box But toolbox does basically the same thing. It's just not quite as well fleshed out I don't think as distro box is but the point remains is that that's where you're supposed to do The things that you would normally do in your root file system You're supposed to do those in those containerized environments And back when I first did that quinoa review a year ago I didn't know what distro box was. I knew that toolbox existed, but I didn't know how to use it And some most of that was my fault for lack of research But also it just the documentation at that point was really bad It's gotten a little bit better since then But the idea behind using this alternative You know containerized system just didn't make sense to me at the at that point now these days I'm a distro box fanboy. I know exactly how it works And I understand the benefits of using it not just to get applications that you can't get otherwise But also the ability to on an immutable distro have a fully functioning regular Root file system that you can do whatever you want with without worrying about the immutable aspect of it And it all this is containerized and you don't have to worry about messing anything up on your regular Distro the the the base level immutable distro you don't mess around with any of that stuff and you can therefore have Full control but in a containerized and well supervised and idiot proof way of messing around with stuff without having to deal with any of the the Horrible things that could happen if you were to say delete your etsy directory, whatever, you know I mean, so that's I think the primary difference I have now between a year ago is that I understand That that immutable aspect of your distribution isn't a limitation It's just a different way of using your your computer And add on top of it with the new technologies of distro box and you know docker and podman and all this stuff You can have the same experiences. You've always had but with less risk You don't have you don't have to worry about having to Always be careful with that underlying system because that underlying system is just there you don't touch it it has images of that base system And you continue to move forward with new images every time there's an update And you can go back and forward if you need to do different versions But for the most part you just simply use your computer and you don't worry about any of this stuff You just don't worry about it and that is what has been so good About this experience this time with kinaway is that I've just been able to use it now Like I said, there have still like I showed still some kde bugs that just you know, uh katie You're cute, but you need to figure your shit out, right? You know sometimes you Kde can't help itself, but to be buggy sometimes. That's just yeah, you're supposed to stay on there, bro but Anyways, you know, it's just it can't help it sometimes but The base level distro itself has been rock solid and very very good overall. Those are my experiences now Some provisos first off. I did no gaming on this machine at all. This is not a gaming machine has dedicated intel graphics. So Yeah, oh actually I lied about that. I'm pretty sure actually that I did I feel like I installed Hearthstone on this at one point or the other maybe I have Uninstalled it since then I don't really remember I've been using this for so long that I can't remember everything that I've done on it But I believe at some point I actually installed Hearthstone on it through either lutris or bottles Oh, you know, I bet you that's what that's where it was. I bet you it was bottles Yeah, it was it was a bottle that I installed this on so that's about the limit of my gaming on this machine So yeah, it worked fine on bottles because at one point I couldn't get Hearthstone to work on my open suzer machine So I had to come use Hearthstone on the laptop and it worked fine But that was the only gaming that I did so I don't have any gaming test or b-roll to show you guys In fact, I have no b-roll at all to show you guys You guys have just been staring at the neofetch of this before so for the entire video But overall, yeah, I didn't do any gaming on this. I've just been doing Uh python programming on this basically that's all I've been doing and it has been Like it's been a really good experience I and and this is gonna sound really weird coming from me if you guys Know me at all and you've watched any of my videos. You know that I'm not a genome guy like at all but I think From my experiences that genome makes a better immutable desktop environment for immutable distros than kde does kde just has these little Things that like the global thing that just don't Work for whatever reason now The global theme installation on a normal linux distribution doesn't always work either So maybe they just need to actually fix that instead of just ignoring it for the last five years You know, it's been broken ever since I came to linux and actually six years now and it hasn't been fixed So I shouldn't be surprised but it feels like it's truly broken on immutable distros And that's something that they should definitely look at. So it feels like genome would be a better choice but outside of those little bitsy pain points for the most part Definitely the ublue version of kena white has been better. It's been more cohesive been more stable And just overall it has worked better than the Original kena white did a year ago. Now, like I said, I can't tell you whether that kena white has gotten better Haven't used it So if that's something that you want to take me to take a look at again You guys can leave a comment in the comment section below and kind of let me know but overall Using kena white on a laptop has just been a very very good experience now One of the things I like about ublue so much and I've made a video on ublue before Just a very surface level, you know Kind of first look of ublue is that if I wanted to I could very easily go grab one of their other images and put it on yours if I wanted to use budgie Or if I wanted to use sway or if I wanted to use, you know, genome, I could do that very easily I just go grab one of those images rebase to it and within five minutes I'll have switched to that in your desktop environment. So that's what makes ublue really awesome And all of those images come with the benefits that they build in so the other They'll have distro box installed to all have the codex and stuff All put together in the package without you having to deal around with it. They'll have The flat hub and everything automatically enabled so that you can actually use flat hub Although Base level fedora has that now too, but when I first installed this they didn't so it's it's A good thing to have So you get all those benefits and the ability to switch back and forth between the different desktop environments Whatever you want if that's what you choose to do And I really like that project quite a lot and I'm just kind of happy that I've been using it for so long And it's just been a very good experience. So A very rambly video. I I'm fully aware of that but What else is new so that is it for this video if you have thoughts comments on Uh keen on what you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you This is my first experience of running something through a capture card and actually making a video on it So hopefully when I go through and edit this it actually turned out. Okay, if it didn't I'm gonna have to start over again, which will just make me very very very very very very happy also Not happy But anyways, if you have uh, if you haven't already leave a thumbs up on this video It'd really help the channel you can follow me on mattes at honor odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast You can also head on over to the shop where you'll find a whole bunch of merch You'll find desk mats and hats and water bottles and all sorts of stuff All that stuff goes directly towards helping me make more linux content So if you like this kind of content and you want some awesome merch head on over there at shop at the linuxcast.org There's that's where you'll find all of that stuff and stay tuned There'll be some deals coming up in the next week or so so Make sure you check those out I'll make sure to post those on the community page on mastodon and on discord as well So thanks everybody for watching. 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