Many distros ship flatpak app store with default filter set to Verified Publisher only.

Also, if your distro doesn’t do this, you can do it yourself. You can modify, for instance, KDE Discover’s flathub repo to use the verified subset.

Got it, thanks for explaining!

Where Google’s team put innovative effort into ChromeOS was in making it robust enough to be sold to the masses in the hundreds of millions of units, with no tech support. It’s immutable, with image-based updates. It has two root partitions, one of which updates the other, so there’s always a known good one to fall back to if an update should fail.

Vanilla OS also uses a two root partition system, called ABRoot, for its atomicity. The author should look into that, as it seems to be exactly what they’re looking for.

This is a more fault-tolerant design than SUSE’s MicroOS-based systems, which use the rather fragile Btrfs. It’s also much simpler than the Fedora Atomic immutable systems, including offshoots such as Universal Blue, which use the Git-like — for which, read “fearsomely complex” — OSTree. For added entertainment, Fedora also defaults to Btrfs, with compression enabled. If you don’t believe us about the problems of damaged Btrfs volumes, refer to the Btrfs documentation. We recommend taking the orange-highlighted Warning section very seriously indeed.

Stupid fearmongering about BTRFS (and OSTree, I presume). I selected an OpenSUSE distro precisely because it uses BTRFS and Snapper for automatic and transparent snapshots by default, which simplifies undoing most things that can break a system.

Thanks!

You mean the attachment in my comment above? It’s a webp file copied from the article, the table of year-by-year Linux desktop market share (global).

I’m not sure about the legal intricacies of it, but there is commercial software being distributed through flatpak on Flathub for a while now. The first example that comes to mind is Bitwig, a well-known, paid, commercial Digital Audio Workstation: https://flathub.org/apps/com.bitwig.BitwigStudio

Also, Flathub is working on offering paid apps: https://news.itsfoss.com/flathub-paid-apps/

I thought this may be a consideration too, but I would expect it to be a minority of websites that would do this, no?

For sure, it seems to be much less talked about than the distro itself. I’m not sure how well it works on other distros, so that would warrant research.

Out of genuine curiosity, what is the reasoning for using the Win user agent?

I know! This article kind of addresses that with this line: “although we can’t be certain of the exact numbers, Linux is clearly growing”.

Interestingly enough, reading through again, the 6% figure is from US government sites, but the growth numbers in the line I quoted in the post is actually global. Here’s the graph they’re referring to:

I hadn’t noticed that dip in 2025 until I looked at this graph more closely!

I believe I’ve heard that you can use the Nix configuration tool that gives this functionality on any distro? But yes, I’ve also avoided it so far because it seems complicated. Perhaps in the future, when I’m more versed on Linux.

If you list what specific software you use and whether you’re willing to try alternatives to any of it, people may be able to give you guidance on how your Linux experience may be. There are lots of people doing music production and digital art on Linux, but it depends on your specifics whether it will work for you or not.

Regarding distros, I’ve seen many people here make the argument that immutable/atomic distros like Bazzite are not ideal for newbies or more complex use cases. If you’re considering immutables because of the comfort that comes with their being more easily recoverable from OS update or configuration issues, I would suggest looking into one of the OpenSUSE distros, either Tumbleweed or Leap. Those two give you many of the advantages of easy recovery without the disadvantages of immutables.

They do this by taking a different approach to recovery. Instead of making the OS root immutable/atomic, which forces you to do a lot of workarounds in certain circumstances, they used the approach of automatic and transparent system snapshots whenever you update or install any software, plus hourly (I believe?).

This is the main factor that led me to choose OpenSUSE for my own personal use. There are other positives such as a reputation for stability, excellent integration of KDE, and YaST, which is their easier to use configuration tool for many system tasks. I’m only at the beginning of my journey though, so I can’t fully endorse it yet because I haven’t fully settled into it and spent much time daily driving it.

I’m not sure about the 5% story, but this 6% one is specifically about US government sites. Sorry I didn’t mention that in the post.

They used a different data source for this one and mentioned why they preferred this one over the one from the day before.

The 5% story was published yesterday. This new article from today says that they trust the government site figures more than StatCounter which was cited on yesterday’s story.

Thankfully I have some requirements for laptops that very significantly narrow my options:

• It must have a good, ergonomic keyboard
• It must have a good pointing stick

That only leaves Thinkpads for me to consider.

You could also restructure your workflow slightly. Instead of downloading from iCloud, there are good options to sync directly from your phone to your PC. I use an app called PhotoSync. It allows you wirelessly offload photos from phone to PC at the touch of a button, or even automatically, I believe. It’s a one-time purchase too, not subscription. It also supports Linux targets via open protocols.