Since last commenting here, I've tried both Silverblue and Kinoite. Partitioning for Silverblue is undocumented (I had to do it all custom because I installed to the same USB stick that contained the installer itself), but I was able to figure it out after 4 or 5 tries.
OSTree is absolutely awesome, and for me it definitely seems to fill a niche between total anarchy and total NixOS. I could just rebase into Kinoite from my existing Silverblue installation, and then boot right back into Silverblue once I was done trying it.
I gotta say, GNOME (Silverblue) was a much better experience for me than KDE Plasma (Kinoite), even though it's Wayland. I'm not sure why I remembered Plasma so fondly, but it looks terrible on my 4K display and has all sorts of issues. The last I had used it was in 2017 on a 1080p screen, so maybe my standards were just low back then, but GNOME has definitely spoiled me, especially with how great its trackpad support is.
Additionally, getting Nvidia acceleration on my cheap laptop was darn simple, just install a single package and add a few kargs and boom.
Silverblue feels like it has a lot of the same benefits as Alpine without any of the downsides, although the layered packages have to be compiled into an image before they can be used, instead of being applied at boot time. It's only one command, but it takes quite some time on my hexa-core i7-10750H - maybe it'd be faster if I were running it off my internal NVMe SSD.
I feel like if I were to switch to Linux desktop it would probably be Silverblue. It's just really good and I'm glad I finally got around to trying it.
OSTree is absolutely awesome, and for me it definitely seems to fill a niche between total anarchy and total NixOS. I could just rebase into Kinoite from my existing Silverblue installation, and then boot right back into Silverblue once I was done trying it.
I gotta say, GNOME (Silverblue) was a much better experience for me than KDE Plasma (Kinoite), even though it's Wayland. I'm not sure why I remembered Plasma so fondly, but it looks terrible on my 4K display and has all sorts of issues. The last I had used it was in 2017 on a 1080p screen, so maybe my standards were just low back then, but GNOME has definitely spoiled me, especially with how great its trackpad support is.
Additionally, getting Nvidia acceleration on my cheap laptop was darn simple, just install a single package and add a few kargs and boom.
Silverblue feels like it has a lot of the same benefits as Alpine without any of the downsides, although the layered packages have to be compiled into an image before they can be used, instead of being applied at boot time. It's only one command, but it takes quite some time on my hexa-core i7-10750H - maybe it'd be faster if I were running it off my internal NVMe SSD.
I feel like if I were to switch to Linux desktop it would probably be Silverblue. It's just really good and I'm glad I finally got around to trying it.