This is a hit piece. Aurora is my daily driver for work and I think it’s great. It guarantees you always have a working system (assuming you use deployment pinning) and that alone is worth it to me for the stability and anxiety-free updates. If you switched to Bazzite for your gaming PCs last year like I did, Aurora is a natural fit for your productivity needs.
I’m running Bazzite on my “everything” PC. Do you feel like Aurora has notable advantages? Seems to me that “gaming” distros like Bazzite are just ordinary distros with correct GPU drivers and a couple other niceties. I don’t see anything that detracts from productivity.
Bazzite is perfectly usable for productivity in most cases. I have Aurora DX installed on my work box which comes with libvirtd and other sundries that you need for virtualization. You can do that with Bazzite but it would require layering.
Gotcha. Yeah, that’s been a pain point for me on previous distros. On Bazzite they make it easy with
ujust setup-virtualization. I’m not sure if that’s a one-size-fits-all solution but it suits my needs, at least.ujust setup-virtualization
I didn’t realize that was a thing! Neat. Do you know what all that includes? On Aurora DX I only had to layer virt-top (virtio-win can be installed as a local package). My use case: I run a Windows VM that uses the discrete graphics card.
Edit: I did an rpm-ostree reset this week and found virtio-win was baked into the deployment. Long story but this started as a Bazzite machine, then I mistakenly rebased to the Silverblue source image that they used to make all the ublue OSes (which is a thing you can do, but obviously not supported or desired) before I eventually rebased again to Aurora DX. Learning is fun. At no point did the system fail to work, though. Kinda badass.
I think all it does is install the virt-manager Flatpak and then set a bunch of kernel arguments with
rpm-ostree kargs ...depending on various hardware detections.
Eh, I only do embedded work which doesn’t work even with layering unless you layer everything which defeats the point.
Good thing is that I just have a distrobox for embedded work that spins up whenever I need.
When I tried it a few months ago, I found that documentation was very sparse. It was difficult to even find out all of the things they had modified from either standard fedora or bazzite.
And while the reviewers complain of it being sluggish in a VM (not a good real world test IMHO), I too found it to be slower than a standard distro.
I like the ideas from uBlue, but they seem to have far too many projects to properly polish and support each one.
I looked into Aurora after seeing it recommended here but it is basically the same as Kinoite. I tried both and couldn’t tell the difference so I stuck with the more “official” one from Fedora
From what I’ve tested (in VMs) Bazzite was a decent performer while Aurora was quite a bit slower.
Edit: My testing was very basic. I was just curious to see what they were like and how they were different from traditional distros.
Ublue is from Austria?!
I’ve been daily driving Bazzite for over a year and I’m super happy with it, can’t say if updates are slow or not, don’t really mind.
It isn’t, the author is quoting distrowatch without checking. The two main contributors are from the United States and Finland.
Haha, amazing (/depressing), thanks!
Called it
