Hello there!
I just checked and it was January 2023 since I last logged into the forum. Since that time I have had such wild experiences with distros. Who can forget the disastrous Arch GRUB day where most got back into the arch-chroot, well I wasn’t one of them. So I lost so much work when my snapshotting system failed me when I needed it most. It was from that day I decided no more rolling systems, so I moved to an immutable distro, Silverblue. If not just for the immutability, but for the solid snapshot on the grub main menu, it had to be a better move. Rollback saved me more than once, but Silverblue still has a long way to go–it’s very restrictive and every time you add something to the layer, its a painfully long process and reboot each time. But then I always had this sneaking feeling in the back of my mind about that murky corporate relationship between IBM, Red Hat and Fedora. I’m just a community user and they exist for the corporate world. I get it, they have to make money, but we are their guinea pigs.
For many years, Thunderbird has been my mail client of choice, but then Mozilla seems to have changed it’s focus. Now Mozilla seem to be paying only lip service to privacy and security, while they engage in the very same tactics they have been calling out others for doing. So while browsing the GNOME Software repo, I found GNOME Evolution, and thought where has this been all my life. All the features I had been longing for, like truly nested threading, inbuilt backup and restore and no need to worry about a third-party addon developer losing interest and leaving us to scramble for replacements once they pull the pin. So I thought I have the perfect solution: Silverblue with Evolution, but no. Silverblue won’t give full access to the GNOME Flatpak and Flathub versions of Evolution completely. The spellcheck dependencies don’t get installed with Evolution on either version. I’m no developer, but still a pretty savvy user, so I’m not going to layer Evolution and the gspell dependencies on the rpm-ostree just to get Spellcheck. And I don’t want to dnf in toolbox and start Evolution in terminal. Sure I can create a desktop icon, but that’s a bit above my pay grade. So I reluctantly decide to rebase from Silverblue to Fedora Worksation. This time it’s better. At least I can can install the RPM version and all the spellcheck dependencies work, but now I have no rollback system. Fedora does things a bit differently with their so-called Btrfs partitioning of @/ and @/home, so even though I can get snapper working, all I want is a Grub-btrfs on GRUB meanu which I can choose a snapshot and rollback whenever a bad update come out.
Hope you are still with me. What have I been thinking all this time. Tumbleweed has been staring at me in the face all this time, and it does snapshots of the box.(actually OpenSuse created snapper) Evolution is installed as the default mail client and installed all the spellcheck dependencies without even asking for them. I never really gave Tumbleweed a thorough test, but that was because of issues installing it. Some strange error that it encoutered an error and could not continue with the only option to abort the installation. I heard quite a few Youtubers echo these sentiments, but then I was watching Matt on LinuxCast on Youtube has been strongly advocating for Tumbleweed. So I installed it and I am am really happy with Tumbleweed and Evolution. And I never thought I would go back to a rolling release model, but here I am today.
Obviously I now have to start learning Tumbeweed, as its a new experience and looks like a steep learning curve. Just opening up the ports to allow me to install a printer has been a challenge. I will say Fedora detected printers and installed them after scanning the network. Even though OpenSUSE does not do all the work for me, I am pretty confident these little kinks can get ironed out over time and the sheer superiority of the distro and its community are what really shine. If the fact that my Canon MFC printer is listed at CUPS as not supported, but I know otherwise, so I am confident of getting this solved with some kind help from the forum. Thanks for reading, you deserve a medal for putting up with my rambling. Feel free to chat with me. See you in the forum.
Michael.