OP, it seems as if the fear mongering and misinformation may have reached you through your cautious disposition.

I've gone through every single comment found below your post and at times I've been dumbfounded and/or astonished by the ludicrous claims that are spouted.

FFS, someone even expressed a problem found on imperative systems... While Fedora Atomic can be made (relatively) declarative (i.e. the exact opposite of imperative) for over a year now.

I will leave you with two videos in which the recent conference talks by the very same people that work on Fedora Atomic can be found. Consider watching these if you're interested to know what they're actually currently working on. If you pay attention, you will even notice how they mention common misconceptions that have also been brought up here...

First watch this one. Then, watch this.

The only fair criticism that I've found is the required investment and effort to adjust due to the associated paradigm shift and learning curve. However, this is peanuts compared to Guix System or NixOS.

Thank you for the answer and for your time! I wish you a nice day!

I'm not the one you posed your question towards, but it's related to Bazzite's relation to Fedora Atomic and uBlue.

To put it simply, dnf is the 'source of truth' when it comes to package management (i.e. finding, installing, updating, removing (etc) of packages) on (traditional/regular) Fedora. So, dnf is basically to Fedora what apt used to be to Ubuntu. Sure, you can use Flatpak or any other (additional) package manager. But, there's no need to unless the software you seek is not available for installation through dnf.

Bazzite, on the other hand, does not allow you to install any packages through dnf. Instead, rpm-ostree, flatpak, Toolbx/Distrobox and (exclusive to uBlue projects) brew (and ujust) are provided by default. But, you might have to learn when you'd have to use which and why.

To educate yourself on this, you should definitely consider reading up on the related entry within Bazzite's documentation. In general, there's a lot of very useful stuff in Bazzite's documentation. Therefore, if you intend to use Bazzite, you should definitely read through its documentation.

When the laptop is from Framework (like OP's laptop is) and is one of the 'supported' distros, and if said distro has a more robust update scheme (related to its immutability), then, quite frankly, its as close to "tailored to your hardware by a team of qualified and paid engineers" as it gets.

You seem to be ignorant; the use of this word is not meant derogatory. In all fairness, it's perfectly fine; we all gotta start out somewhere. So, please allow me to elaborate.

Being the first distro on which new technologies are introduced

Consider checking up on where Wayland, systemd, PipeWire, PulseAudio etc first appeared; so on which particular distro.

Also atomic branch?

Fedora Atomic, i.e. the first attempt to Nix'ify an established distro. Most commonly known through Fedora Silverblue or Fedora Kinoite. Peeps formerly referred to these as immutable. However, atomic (i.e. updates either happen or don't; so no in-between state even with power outage) is more descriptive. It's also the most mature attempt. Derivatives like Bazzite are the product of this endeavour. From the OG distros, only openSUSE (with its Aeon) has released an attempt. However, it seems to be less ambitious in scope and vision. I wish it the best, but I find it hard to justify it over Fedora Atomic.

SELinux might be a fair point, but I doubt that ss unique to Fedora tbh.

OOTB, apart from Fedora (Atomic), it's only found on (some) Fedora derivatives and openSUSE Aeon (which forces you to use GNOME and Aeon's specific container-focused workflow). Arch, Gentoo and openSUSE (perhaps even Debian) do 'support' SELinux, but it can be a real hassle do deal with. And it's not OOTB.

If you make claims, you better substantiate it. I just did your homework 😂. Regardless, I'm still interested to hear a distro with more impressive USPs. Let me know 😉.

What's with openSUSE Tumbleweed?

Do you think its USPs are more compelling? If so, consider naming those USPs in order for them to be evaluated.

Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore

False on Fedora Atomic.

Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint

Distrobox and Nix exists.

More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

Mint, perhaps. For Ubuntu, this was only true in the past. And only if PPAs were used sparingly. But Snaps have been a disaster for them in this case. So much so, that even Valve told Ubuntu users to use the Flatpak for Steam instead of the Snap.

Very informative. I appreciate it!

I'm not the one you asked your question, but I think I understood what they meant.

First of all, technically MicroOS is the non-desktop version of openSUSE's take on an atomic/immutable distro. The desktop variants are referred to as Aeon (for GNOME) and Kalpa (for KDE).

Secondly, while Aeon/Kalpa definitely is to openSUSE what Silverblue/Kinoite is to Fedora, there's a clear difference in vision and maturity.

Vision

Fedora Atomic is a very ambitious project; everything points toward it being Fedora's take on NixOS. But, unlike NixOS, it couldn't start from scratch nor did they intend to. Instead, it's the process of evolving their existing products into something special. As such, it has been over two years since Fedora has even explicitly stated that they intend for Fedora Atomic to become the default eventually (without saying anything about sunsetting the old). While, AFAIK, openSUSE has yet to make similar statements regarding Aeon/Kalpa.

Maturity

Everything points towards Fedora Atomic being more mature than openSUSE MicroOS; work on the project has started earlier, Fedora Atomic is almost done with their transition (from image-based) to OCI while I don't recall openSUSE mention anything regarding their transition (from 'snapshots') to image-based since they mentioned it briefly last year. Furthermore, Bazzite (based on Fedora Atomic) has become the face of Gaming Linux while openSUSE' MicroOS fails to deliver on anything but Aeon. Which, to be fair, is absolutely fine. But not everyone is fan of GNOME.

So, use Tumbleweed if:

• You prefer the traditional model
• You like YaST
• You like the rolling release model and not being tied to GNOME

Use Aeon if:

• You like GNOME and an atomic distro on a rolling release distro
• You prefer the opinionated, hands off, little to no customization path that openSUSE has currently chosen for its Aeon
• You like a containerized future

Use Fedora Atomic if:

• You want an atomic distro, but don't like any of the decisions made for Aeon; i.e.
  • prefer to use KDE, Budgie or Sway (or any other desktop environment through uBlue)
  • aren't that big of a fan of container workloads
  • prefer having the choice of installing native packages
• Prefer atomic on top of a point release distro

Finally, regarding containers specifically; let's say you want to install package X.

• On Tumbleweed, you just do sudo zypper install X and you're done with it.
• On Aeon, if it's available as a Flatpak, you do flatpak install X. If there's no Flatpak of it, you install it within a container that you access through Distrobox. Within the container, use the package manager corresponding to the container. Technically, while inside the container, the environment is very similar to Tumbleweed. So, say you got a Tumbleweed container, then you can continue using sudo zypper install X.
• On Fedora Atomic, you can layer onto the system through rpm-ostree install X; this is very close to how installing packages work on Tumbleweed. And, you can continue using both Flatpak and Distrobox; like how it's done on Aeon. Note that Tumbleweed also allows access to Flatpak and Distrobox. So, Aeon is most restricted as it can't install packages onto the base system. Btw, Fedora Atomic accomplishes this through layers that can also be peeled off later on (through uninstalling for example). With this, the base system actually isn't affected, but the end user doesn't notice it.

Until now I used distrobox but I always wondered which distro/ package manager to use. What’s your experience with it?

The answers found below this post resonate with my own experiences.

I do have a question: When you run the sestatus command in the terminal, what string/description is found corresponding to "Current mode"?

But BSDs and Linux are very similar in design philosophy and are dependent on each other.

Interesting. Would you mind elaborating on the bold parts? Thank you in advance :D !

Thanks!

It has been my pleasure 😊.

Is there anything to be expected when updating the system to a new version?

The write-up found above ensures that the two systems don't share any space within the same drive. Therefore, there's nothing to worry about.

For example, I've upgraded Fedora from 39 to 40 about two months ago without any troubles. Heck, I'm on Bluefin's :latest. So, the update to 40 happened automatically in the background without notifying me. So, with the very next reboot I suddenly found myself on 40 😅. I probably wouldn't even have noticed any difference were it not that some GNOME extensions didn't work right away. Otherwise, it was a perfectly smooth update.