A person can consider a thing as awesome or not, and can change the opinion based on a situation. Sex is also like that. But sex is one of the things which influence thinking and behavior much. Is fear awesome? Is pain awesome? Something like that.

I will use it. I don’t care what others think. People can use su, sudo, doas, run0 by their choice, and I don’t see why we need a common opinion about it.

Maybe they are new users who miss Windows, so they are trying to find reasoning to stay on Linux. I as an old user have no more any special emotions about Windows. I play with it form time to time. But the OS is quite conservative because of its market monopoly and I don’t find anything new and interesting in new releases. It is not special about Windows, all consumer OSes are kinda stabilized now, and corporations do not want to experimenting and build new things.

So, I don’t hate Windows, I just don’t find it interesting for me. I use and will use it on a separate machine for some niche tasks, when they require windows-only software.

It is quite opinionated though.

Oh, I see also by their screenshots, that Bluefin also spoils the UX of GNOME with custom extensions. So I will consider it the Manjaro (or Mint) of immutable distros.

Silverblue is an official Fedora edition, almost exact Fedora Workstation, but immutable. I use it. universal blue is a third-party project and their images are bloated with additional “features”: packages, drivers, etc. Bluefin contains Homebrew for example. It’s how they describe it, but I haven’t tried it to say more precise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

PackageKit

Bad to whom?

At least it is not a cheap copy of Windows.

Tor Browser does, but differently. It attempts to behave in the same way an all platforms, ignores installed libs/fonts/etc, uses letterboxing against resolution fingerprinting.

https://support.torproject.org/tbb/maximized-torbrowser-window/

It is comparatively to Debian/Ubuntu derivatives. Even Arch and NixOS probably have more users now. Lately I see some popularity of uBlue derivatives among new users, but I don’t know how many people use it, and where the popularity comes from.

Because Mint is popular among the crowd, and such challenges are also driven by the crowd. Better to see it as some social or meme dynamics, than to explain it with logical reasons. I also see more new users who use arch, because of the “I use arch BTW” meme.

As a Fedora Silverblue user I find it hard to recommend it to new users. It’s not an issue with Fedora, but with the state of Linux desktop in general. At least with Mint/Ubuntu people can rely on social media and the community if they have problems. And Fedora is a more niche thing, and doesn’t have a big crowd.

Moreover, I chose Fedora because of my experience, which allows me to have opinion what is better. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to explain the years of the Linux desktop drama to new users, when they are just doing the first steps or trying to feed their curiosity.

Give attention to Qubes OS also, It’s the easiest way for separating apps for different tasks, using them with different proxies (VPNs, Tor) or profiles at the same tame.

I’m not sure if your issues are related to the distro(s) used and not to the hardware. But if you wish immutable distros…

You can try to use Ubuntu, but installing all the apps as snaps (and/or flatpaks). That will give you immutable-like experience on a regular Ubuntu installation. Otherwise, I’d recommend to try Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon.

Tor Browser is the best way.

Not true about Rawhide. It’s a testing environment for maintainers and developers. And it often has many outdated packages.

Oh, these long-awaited arm laptops are designed for high TDP and have active cooling. I don’t see why to choose them over Intel/AMD in that case.

a “bug”

Oh, finally!