Arch is an OS that’s quite fully featured

Not entirely sure what you mean with that.

suited to veteran/power users

The gist is that Arch pretty much comes with little to no defaults. So, you are literally put into the position to make all the important decisions. Which, as you might have imagined already, basically requires you to be pretty knowledgeable on Linux in the first place. Thus making it mostly unsuitable for new users. Though, I won’t dismiss a special breed of newb that somehow manages to rawdog it quite ‘successfully’.

because it has regular updates

We refer to its release cycle as rolling release. Which basically alludes to the absence of a point release.

The version of Linux Mint you were on is 21.2 and you’ll soon be on 22.3. After some time, you’ll be on 23.x etc. These are referred to as point releases. So, whenever a new point release update hits, you’ll receive a couple of months’ worth of updates. And between two consecutive point releases, you’ll receive little to no updates. So, basically, Linux Mint deliberately chooses to hold updates of. By doing so, it ensures you’ll only receive updates that have undergone thorough testing.

Arch, on the other hand, has a much leaner testing phase. Heck, as pointed out earlier, it doesn’t even wait for a certain moment to reach before it outputs an update. Instead, after the packages have had some testing, it pushes the updates out for its users to receive it. As such, you’ll receive constant updates. And you’re somewhat expected to at least perform daily updates. By doing so, it ensures you’ll always have access to the latest and greatest.

Note that Arch is not the only rolling release distro. But, out of the ‘Big 3’^[1], it’s the only one that is rolling release by default.

Its release cycle does indirectly contribute to Arch being less newbie-friendly. Basically, any update comes with the risk of causing breakage. On Debian, this risk is partly mitigated by the infrequency of updates and by pushing out very well-tested updates to begin with. On Arch, you just have to deal with it every once in a while.

Note, however, that it’s most often your fault and not Arch’s. Secondly, after dealing with this a couple of times, you’d have acquired some excellent skills in troubleshooting.

highly mutable

Traditional distros are basically equally mutable. So, Arch doesn’t (necessarily) outdo e.g. Debian or Fedora in this regard.

It has its own repo too by the looks of it?

It does. But that’s a thing with independent distros. Linux Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. Which, itself is a derivative of Debian. Debian, however, is independent. Similarly, Arch isn’t derived from anything else; hence, it’s an independent distro.

The list of independent distros isn’t huge or anything, but I suppose there are at least a couple of dozens of 'm.

As for the own repository part, both pkgs.org and repology.org feature some resources on that.

hardened

This is an important keyword but perhaps not sufficiently discussed. I’d reckon focusing on it will be pretty helpful.

So…, what is it you want? Is it

• A. Make a fortress out of a very decent starting point? To daily drive it afterwards*.
• Or B. Daily drive a fortress built by someone else?
• Or perhaps even C. Something else entirely?

By the rest of your post, I’d bet on B. Which, puts us into an interesting situation…

systemd free

Assuming^[1] DistroWatch does a decent job at tagging/categorizing, there are only a handful of distros that are both systemd-free and tagged with “security”. Note that half of these don’t survive it upon closer inspection, which leaves us with Alpine, HardenedBSD and OpenBSD.

If you’re well-versed into hardened distros, you’ll note the absence of Linux’ finest in this category; namely Kicksecure and secureblue. Their absence is due to their (heavy) reliance on systemd for additional hardening.

Furthermore, note that DistroWatch doesn’t mention how well the likes of Artix, Gentoo and Void (among others) would function as excellent starting points to build your own fortress from.

You can access those past images/snapshots even from a new install ;) .

As it seems to have been some time since it started, I’d suggest trying out the oldest still accessible snapshot/image.

Others have basically already pointed out how you should go about diagnosing the problem. Which, by itself, is already very valuable.

Below, I will try to touch upon some tips and tricks that are worth noting in this context, assuming Bazzite*.

• Pinning a specific deployment to return back to. As we’ll be doing some time traveling in a bit, it’s definitely recommended to pin your latest deployment (just in case) before you do anything else. See this entry in Bazzite’s documentation on that.
• Rolling back to images from a certain day. So, IIRC, all of the uBlue products keep around 90 days worth of images you can rollback to. See Bazzite’s documentation on brh for more information. With this (and some effort), you can literally pinpoint the exact date from which you started to have problems with gamescope/game mode.
• Looking into the exact changes between two deployments. So, after you’ve identified the last properly working deployment and the first deployment that started misbehaving, you can invoke the rpm-ostree db diff command to see what has changed between the two deployments. Note two things on this:
  • That the hashes coincide with the ones you actually want to compare.
  • The command catches only changes in packages. However, a config diff applied by Bazzite’s maintainers will not be shown here.
• Asking help from community channels. You can even start here. But basically, a project’s discord/discourse is undoubtedly better equipped in helping you out. See this entry on Bazzite’s documentation for links.

Wish ya good luck fam 😉!

Alright, excellent. Thank you for the reply!

So, IIUC, you want a clean slate. Furthermore, you want plenty of tinkerability. And, finally, OpenRC enjoys a preference.

Still, I want to limit our search (for now) to (relatively) upstream distros on which OpenRC is known to work pretty well. We have to start our search from somewhere and this seems to be the most sensible starting point at this point.

If you’ve dismissed Artix, that basically leaves us (in alphabetical order) with:

• Alpine
• Debian
• Devuan
• Gentoo

IIRC, most (if not all) of these offer very minimal images. So, hopefully you’ll enjoy those.

Thankfully, these are meaningfully different from eachother (for the most part). So choosing between these shouldn’t be too much to ask.

FWIW, Gentoo comes undoubtedly with the least amount of defaults and thus behaves the most like a blank slate.

I am most fond of Arch

But what is it that you like about Arch in the first place?

I found that I’m more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.

Like, do you want to limit your options to distros that are well supported by OpenRC? Or, is this simply a preference kind of thing?

the Artix forums also seem to house at least some transphobia

Do you want to engage in distro-specific forums or was your engagement in there mostly out of necessity?

as opposed to configured by me.

Excellent, so you’re a builder/tinkerer that prefers a clean slate to work from.

Assuming you’re involved with the development on AstrOS, thank you first of all for your efforts and secondly for providing your perspective on the matter!

Imo it generally does too much.

Oh, I can definitely see that; probably the consequence of retrofitting an OCI/Docker image into an OS 😅. I suppose that its relation with (rpm-)ostree doesn’t help either.

Systemd-sysupdate being simple as hell makes it just way more solid.

That’s some cool insight. Thank you.

I think it also depends on grub and stuff

I believe it did, yes. But, AFAIK, systemd-boot has been supported since earlier this year. I believe that change has also been instrumental in the relatively recent activities surrounding so-called sealed images.

I remember hearing even all the Fedora-based atomic distros don’t use UKI, so they are vulnerable to initramfs modifications

This has been a thing for the longest time. But the situation has been changing since about a year ago. That work has eventually led to the release of so-called sealed bootc images. Which, in turn, has led (some) projects to start active development on that. From what I know, projects like secureblue are even dogfooding their respective UKIs as we speak.

So, we’ve come a long way and it wouldn’t surprise me if many projects will ship their respective sealed images (alongside their regular images) before the end of the year.

However, there are some glaring issues that need to be addressed, most prominently of which is the loss of layering. Sealed images don’t support layering and probably won’t either. Of course, many different alternatives exist, including system extensions, creating your own custom image with those packages baked in, going the RakuOS-route and probably many others I’m unaware of or forgot about. But, AFAIK, none of the alternatives are as mature as layering has become.

What problems does bootc have? I’m genuinely curious*.

IIRC, it’s another brain child of Mirko Brombin; the prolific designer that’s also prominently involved with Bottles, Singularity Desktop/OS and Vanilla OS.

I wish it the best. Especially since Flatpak’s sandboxing didn’t have any competition up till now. At least, AFAIK*.

From the Linux-first vendors, I am only aware of Star Labs’ StarLite. Their products are pretty good, though a bit price~y.

Thank you! This is actually very helpful! And we can definitely reverse some of their doing 😉. Below I will repeat the invoked commands and provide some context/explanation. So, without further ado.

sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing=zswap.enabled=1
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing=zswap.max_pool_percent=25
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing=zswap.compressor=lz4
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing=systemd.zram=0

The commands found above were used to change the kernel arguments through rpm-ostree. You can still find these back with rpm-ostree kargs --editor. You can even outright remove them, then and there. It’s also possible to literally revert those commands by invoking the following:

sudo rpm-ostree kargs --delete-if-present=zswap.enabled=1
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --delete-if-present=zswap.max_pool_percent=25
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --delete-if-present=zswap.compressor=lz4
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --delete-if-present=systemd.zram=0

sudo rpm-ostree initramfs --enable --arg=--add-drivers --arg=lz4

Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience with this.

sudo swapoff -a
sudo rm -rf /var/swap
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t var_t "/var/swap(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /var/swap
sudo btrfs filesystem mkswapfile --size 32G /var/swap/swapfile
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t swapfile_t "/var/swap/swapfile"
sudo restorecon -v /var/swap/swapfile
sudo swapon -a

Basically, the commands found literally above affect the contents of /var. As such, they’re outside of the ‘jurisdiction’ of rpm-ostree. Reverting these is the same as on any other Linux system.

The following commands change the contents of /etc. As such, they’re being tracked and can be reverted to their original states. Though, I’m not sure if it’s possible to revert them back to their respective versions without those changes.

sudo sed -i '\|/var/swap/swapfile|d' /etc/fstab

I’ll be honest with ya. I don’t know what this one does 😅. I have used sed in the past but wasn’t able to decipher this one. FWIW, it tries to make some changes to /etc/fstab . And, if I’d have to make a guess, I think it deletes any lines that contain /var/swap/swapfile.

echo "/var/swap/swapfile none swap defaults,nofail 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

This added some text to /etc/fstab. To revert it, go to /etc/fstab, and remove /var/swap/swapfile none swap defaults,nofail 0 0

echo "vm.swappiness=120" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-swappiness.conf

This created a file named 99-swappiness.conf and placed it to /etc/sysctl.d/. As such, a simple sudo rm -rf /etc/sysctl.d/99-swappiness.conf suffices.

sudo rpm-ostree install policycoreutils-python-utils

This was an optional command. If you did have to invoke it, then you should find policycoreutils-python-utils when invoking rpm-ostree status. It should be mentioned as a layered package.

To undo it, simply invoke rpm-ostree uninstall policycoreutils-python-utils.

Bazzite’s messaging has merit, but we’d be making a mistake by regarding it as absolute. It makes more sense to take them as carefully written guide lines for a specific audience.

Furthermore. with all due respect, but OP’s writing doesn’t imply installing/managing software with rpm-ostree. Which, is actually the subject of the documentation entry you quoted. As such, I think you might have misunderstood them.

Youre breaking a core tenant of immutable distros by installing system level packages.

Finally, FWIW, I absolutely disagree with the above. The page you quoted from seems to agree with me on this: “Layering packages are mostly intended for system-level applications, libraries, and other dependencies.”

I made some changes using rpm-ostree related to zram and swap

Could you be more transparent and/or elaborate in this regard? Like, what did you actually do?

FWIW, I’ve been on Fedora Atomic since before Bazzite’s existence, but I’ve never once considered using rpm-ostree to make changes to zram and swap. So, I’m a bit confused. To be clear, it’s perfectly possible that what you did is 100% legit, but that it just happened to expose a gap in my knowledge.

I had assumed that, because I used rpm-ostree, the changes would become part of the “tree” and I could rollback to the original settings. But when I went to look at Bazzite’s rollback tools, it seemed solely focused on rolling back to previous official releases, and I couldn’t find any reference to the specific changes I made.

Basically, while rpm-ostree does offer git-like control on your base system; hence, why it’s so powerful to begin with. It does not keep more than two deployments around; at least, by default.

If you would like to keep around a specific deployment (for whatever reason), you can do so with the ostree admin pin <insert number> command. The git-like control also enables you to keep track of:

• the changes applied to /etc; invoke ostree admin config-diff to see what files have been added or modified since installation
• layered packages; simply invoke rpm-ostree status

Keeping track is cool and all, but its usefulness is in full display with powerful applications such as:

• rpm-ostree reset; this basically removes all permutations. That is, two people on the same image, will have the identical base system after this. (Note that this still isn’t as powerful as a factory reset. For that, refer to this issue tracker on bootc^[1].)

Finally, the git-like structure ensures actual reversibility. On most other systems, installing A -> installing B -> uninstalling A will yield a different state than just installing B. With rpm-ostree, the base system between the two will be identical.

For completeness’ sake, I’ve used “base system” above to just mean the contents of /usr and /etc (and maybe some other subdirectories of /). Crucially, the contents of /var are not part of the “base system”.

Fam, with all due respect, perhaps consider to not rely on the AUR at all for the time being. At least, until you’re genuinely confident in your ability to assess PKGBUILDs.

Aight. We seem to have found the culprit. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.|

I mean why would it say a stable image has a testing id and bootloader if its not testing

I’m not familiar with the Bazzite Update Tool. I tried to find it on GitHub, but failed 😅. But, if I’d have to guess, it looks at the same wrong place that fastfetch does.

A couple of issue trackers I found that may (or may not be) related:

• https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/issues/5255
• https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite-dx/issues/209
• https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite-dx/issues/198

Question: Could you paste the output of rpm-ostree status?

Yo OP, in case you couldn’t get GPU passthrough to work; vm-curator makes that a piece of cake, somehow even with a single GPU.

Thanks! Much appreciated 🙂!

Can someone please provide a TL;DW? Much appreciated!