Testing new and keeping old Linux distros in 2025

5 July, 2025 - Categories: Linux - Tags: Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, OpenBSD, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, OpenSUSE Aeon, Toolbx, Distrobox

By Steven Rosenberg

I stick with an operating system on my main laptop for a couple years. And when I run into an unsolvable (by me) problem, or just get bored, I tend to make a move.

That move isn't always from something old to something new. Most of the time I'm going back to a system I have used before.

My lightly used desktop — a 27-inch 2011 iMac — has pretty much run Debian since I brought it over to Linux. Debian 10, 11 and now 12 have all run on this castoff computer, which has its original 1 TB spinning hard drive behind the monitor glass. It would take a lot for me to want to remove that monitor glass to swap in a SATA SSD. The drive would have to die.

I've probably had the iMac on Debian since 2017 or '18. It still has an ancient MacOS partition on it, though there is no reason to boot into it, and Debian keeps stomping on rEFInd.

It's almost time for Debian 13, and I will very likely just upgrade the iMac. Barring some issues with LibreOffice Writer not being able to open a file I created on my Fedora laptop, everything seems to be working. It still runs great under GNOME.

My 2017 HP Envy laptop (all Intel) has seen time on Debian 10 and 11, Fedora Workstation, Silverblue and Kinoite, and OpenBSD.

Right now it has two SSD drives (SATA and NVMe), with Fedora Silverblue 42 on the NVMe and OpenBSD 7.7 on the SATA. Aside from a short rebase to and from Kinoite, this has been my setup for nearly 3 years.

Along with Fedora Kinoite I did a lot of recent testing of KDE Plasma distros in live environments. I also tested a few LXQt distros.

I didn't think Kinoite had the same polish as Silverblue. I ended up missing a lot of GTK apps that I could have used with Kinoite. But I figured that if I not going all Plasma/Qt, I might as well stay in GNOME

Plus, Kinoite didn't handle GTK dark mode as well as Silverblue handles Qt dark mode.

Traditional Plasma distros I tested (Debian, Fedora) had none of these problems, which were exclusive to Kinoite.

There were a number of little things that didn't work right in Atomic Plasma that were fine in normal Plasma, and I didn't get the feeling that anybody was really working on those issues in Kinoite.

Overall I'm really liking Plasma 6, and I wouldn't hesitate to run Plasma in Debian 13 or Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 42.

But I feel like the GNOME Project is developing with Atomic in mind, and the Fedora Project is positioning Silverblue as somewhat of a priority. I'd like to see a bigger and/or more active Silverblue/Kinoite community. Atomic is the future, and it's mostly ready now.

Someone asked if I had tried OpenSUSE Aeon, the Atomic version of that project's distro. I ran it in GNOME Boxes for a while and did like it. A lot of very solid choices have been made for Aeon, and I could very well run it as my daily driver.

But I'm telling myself that I should stick with Silverblue because of the developer support from Fedora/Red Hat and because of the the community, though I tend to feel pretty alone as a Silverblue user. Still, there's a certain simplicity and reliability in Silverblue that keeps me running it.

I know the prevailing opinion is that Distrobox is better than Fedora's Toolbx for CLI and GUI development environments, but I have changed the way I use Toolbx to make it really work for me. I'll go over it in more detail in a future post, but the short and long of it is that I create my Toolbx containers quickly. And instead of updating them individually with distro tools, I periodically delete all my Toolbx containers and the image they are based on with a single toolbox command. Then I re-create as needed.

The six-month Silverblue upgrade is a generally mild annoyance that OpenSUSE Aeon avoids, but there is a certain solid stability — even amid constant updates — that keeps me in Fedora's Atomic system.