I apologize if my english isn’t perfect in how you would say it daily, but I hope it’ll help with Linux popularity and as a reference for future days.
For this post specifically I want opinions regarding what would be best for school lab of tech vocational high school (for both computer networking and software engineering).
- Package update frequency:
- A. Years per update (Debian, OpenSuse Leap)
- B. Every 6 month (Ubuntu/Fedora)
- C. Rolling Release (Debian Sid or Arch but update whenever (every week/month/semester/year))
- Desktop environment:
- A. Gnome
- B. KDE Plasma
- C. Cinnamon
- D. Lightweight DE (XFCE, LXQT, etc.)
- E. Other DE (Mate, Budgie, etc.)
- F. Stacking Window Manager (Fluxbox, IceWM, Openbox, etc)
- G. TIling or Dynamic WM
- Community or Company Distro?
- A. Community Distro
- B. Company Distro
- Display server protocol:
- A. Xorg
- B. Wayland
- File System:
- A. EXT4
- B. BTRFS
- C. Other
- Immutable?
- A. Not Immutable
- B. Immutable
- Functionality
- A. General Purpose (Debian, Arch, OpenSuse)
- B. Specific Purpose (Debian Edu, Parrot Linux, AV linux, etc.)
Let me know your opinion, perhaps I missed some critical question or maybe some question above isn’t that important to consider.
I would be careful using Fedora Immutable as it is still fairly untested.
A stable base and Ansible is probably a safer bet
What are your specific concerns such that I can learn and adjust the recommendation?
Its unproven and still in beta
Still very vague. What needs to be proven such that you would use it?
Proven that it can run without issues. Proven that if you have an issue, you can fix it.
Don’t put untested software in prod
No idea where you get the idea from that it has to be proven and that it’s somewhat unreliable and in beta. I get the impression you talk about something different
You don’t put untested software in prod. You just don’t. It might be fine on your machine but don’t put on systems for others
Fedora Silverblue was released alongside Fedora 30, which was 5 years ago; it is not “untested”, in fact it is quite extensively tested by its userbase. It also is not in beta as you claimed previously, its release with Fedora 30 was its full release, after the betas with Fedora 29. Atomic desktops have been around for longer than that, however. They are far more tested and reliable than you seem to be giving them credit for. In fact, they are far more stable and far more resilient because you can simply roll back changes when you boot. A few previous versions of the entire operating system are available to boot from in GRUB, and it’s as simple as booting into a previous version if a new one has issues. It’s actually the perfect use case for a school computer lab, because each install is perfectly consistent, can be managed and fixed easily if anything were to break (if that were the case then the OS would have broken in non-atomic versions anyway), and nothing the user does will affect the base image of the system. The base image doesn’t change unless it is updated. You can overlay things overtop of the base filesystem, but the base filesystem stays the same, so those overlays can be easily reverted.
Your comment comes right after Fedora Atomic desktops and a few others were hit by a critical bug, where testing appeared to be missing : https://mastodon.social/@deflockcom/112247891318456315
Ansible can do all of that and its been tested for 20 years. Maybe I’m just reading into your comment but it sounds like you are getting upset.
Traditional desktops are much simpler to manage and have more documentation. It would be really cool if immutable desktops became more mainstream but for now they are only a glimpse into what could be. Even uBlue says its in beta.