"Never meet your heros." is as old as celebrity itself.

I think many of my heroes live larger in my mind than they could or should ever fulfill; they couldn't possibly live up to that hype and I wouldn't want to take it from them through the actuality.

Damn shame.

(Side-glance at you UK BBC.)

Install your own from one of the parent distros: Debian, Fedora/openSUSE, sources (eg. Exherbo, Gentoo), the state-based one I always forget.

An atomic distro is one which is in my understanding, has a basis in libostree, right? I'm familiar with the Fedora/RedHat versions but not any others.

Immutable distributions, for me to are wonderful when they are sparse. I don't want anything on my OS which I don't use at least once on a while.

If I install Fedora (RPM) Workstation to a large extent I can remove programs that I don't want. Whereas SilverBlue (libostree), I'm stuck with whatever the maintainers template (is there a blocking mechanism?).

However, with sparse Fedora-IoT, I can't break it - to a large extent - and it doesn't have anything I don't want.

I always install minimal versions of OSs, from Fedora (Everything iso), to Debian (debootstrap) to ArchLinux to Exherbo to Talos, just keep them cleaner longer. Then I fix them until they break!

I think they're ideal for those starting out in Linux because they are not ready to break; not saying that they're not for others too.

There's enough documentation, at least for Fedora atomic distros, to make your own custom spin.

I'm not switching for any desktop, unless the basic OS is minimal; but have switched for Raspberry Pi OS to Fedora IoT (atomic distro), at least temporarily.

I'm not criticising you. I cannot validity criticise you, even if I was so inclined (I'm not), because I cannot proficiently grasp the subject matter. I would like to understand, NOT criticise. You've written an engaging piece which is opaque to me; apparently a contradiction. Hopefully I've rephrased that enough times to get across that no criticism is intended. 😁

I don't know the product names. I don't tend to be focused on product names because they come and go. Your first message didn't help me.

Your last precis is just what I needed. Ideal. Thank-you. I now know what you're trying to achieve.

Wasn't being critical at all. Not expecting you to write for anyone.

I wondered what this actually provides. If you were explaining to someone with a good knowledge of the world, not grandma!!

Thanks fella. What do they actually do? Elevator pitch stylie!

Excuse the ignorance, what am I actually reading about here?

I read the first few paragraphs and an out of my league.

What are 'we' trying to achieve?

Yes. I'm British.

I live these old stories. Kinda gave up programming by 1996. It was a short-sighted thing to do!

Having grown up with Acorn Atoms. BBC Micro, MS and DRDOS, Gem, Xerox something, Windows 1, don't remember 2, 3.0 to 3.11, NT. I didn't realise how nice early (2004) Linux was until I used it in a Windows server hosted VM to handle my phone calls (VoIP@home or something it was called).

I did everything I could to ditch Windows after that. The webification of QuickBooks was the final release.

I agree. I used it to move my vocab on enormously.

Thank-you. Thought so but wasn't sure.

Does prevent side-loading effectively cause problems for open source F-Droid? Apologies for ignorance.

Foot in mouth*

This got me wondering about lionising Go in films. I think I need to start a such a movement amongst directors or screen writers.

I'm hilariously bad at chess. I learned the fools gambit and never progressed.

Oh ok.

I haven't been to a circus recently. My knowledge in that area is wanting, I'll admit. 😳