Testing new and keeping old Linux distros in 2025

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

By Steven Rosenberg

I generally stick with an operating system on my main laptop for a couple years. 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 run before. Usually Debian.

My lightly used desktop — a 27-inch 2011 iMac stuffed with 20 GB of RAM — 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 giant display to swap in a SATA SSD. Basically the drive would have to die. It hasn't.

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 the rEFInd boot manager I installed when I added Linux.

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 with the newer LO on my Fedora Silverblue 42 laptop, everything seems to be working. This 14-year-old hardware still runs great under GNOME.

My 2017 HP Envy laptop (all Intel) — my daily driver computer for personal use — 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 — a nice touch on laptops of this period), 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.

Short aside: Rebasing in the Fedora Atomic family of distros is a cool trick. It's both the way you change from one Atomic distro to another, as well as upgrade from one release to the next.

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 (which I like, but also which won't do a complete dark mode without a fight in which I'm unwilling to engage).

I didn't think Kinoite had the same polish as Silverblue. Along with the desktop switch, I also moved to as many KDE Flatpaks as I could, dumping the equivalent GNOME/GTK Flatpaks in the process.

I ended up missing a lot of GTK apps that I could have continued using with Kinoite. But I figured that if I'm 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 12 and 13, Fedora 42) 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 the current Debian and Fedora releases.

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 recently if I had tried OpenSUSE Aeon, the atomic version of that project's Tumbleweed 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 support from Fedora/Red Hat and the community, though I tend to feel pretty alone as a Silverblue user. Still, there's a certain (perceived by me) 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 version is that I create my Toolbx containers quickly. And instead of updating them individually with distro tools like dnf and apt, I periodically delete all my Toolbx containers and the images they are based on with a single per-image 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 environment.