Bluefin is essentially Aurora with Gnome, and Bazzite has a Gnome version, so if that's more your cup of tea, it's out there!
Tried Aurora in a VM, and while it ran like shit (probably a VM issue, not Aurora's), I was shocked that it reported updates, and by the next boot, it had already updated everything.
I run Bazzite on a laptop, so they're similar, but Aurora really felt clean, polished, and ready for general use.
Weird. I would be interested to know what actually happened, but I am not smart enough to troubleshoot hardware to that degree! At least you found something that works.
TBH, Red Hat focusing their attention on business isn't that problematic for me. RHEL is specifically for businesses, and Red Hat needs to make money to keep operating. Kind of a necessary evil, if you could consider that evil. However, I completely understand why the capitalist realm makes average people squirm.
But that said, I usually prefer community projects myself (Fedora spins included), since they tend to have modified setups that are more in line with what regular users would want or need.
Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.
I've personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they've come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.
I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!
Good to have the facts straight. It's creepy enough on its own without inventing details.
One of these days, I'll have to give Universal Blue a look for general computing. Bazzite is excellent, but I don't imagine my MiL is going to care about having Steam and gamescope installed out of the box, should I ever have to do a fresh install for her.
Curious how your atomic distro broke, since you can rollback and rebase pretty easily after a problematic update. I'm running Bazzite on a 10yo laptop, and it's been great; I even rebased to a completely different DE, then did a rollback when I decided it didn't work for me.
Not implying anything, but why don't you trust Red Hat? Because they're a big company, or because of some other reason?
Podman, from what I can tell, is the result of people wanting a wishlist of fixes/upgrades from Docker and being met with hostility at the notion.
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/24/how-to-run-systemd-in-a-container#enter_podman
Practice in a VM and see for yourself! I did that, set everything up, and ultimately decided it was more system admin detail than I wanted to take on. But as far as ease goes, it's not especially hard, there's just not much in the way of hand-holding or preset configs, and you'll likely find there's a lot of preinstalled drivers and things you take for granted.