thayer

I've been very happy with both Silverblue and Kinoite. I've installed it to all of my workstations now and can't imagine ever going back to a traditional distro.

Your comments suggest that you're already aware of distros like Silverblue so, if I may ask, how are these different than what you're looking for? Silverblue comes with several flatpaks installed, but you can easily remove these and you'll be left with a pretty barebones ostree image.

I've been super happy with my 8th gen Intel NUC i5. I put it in an Akasa Turing fanless case, installed an NVMe for host OS, and an 8TB SSD for data. It's low power and so quiet that I couldn't imagine ever using fans again.
I also have a USB 3.2 drive dock for external backup HDDs, but I only turn it on when actively doing a monthly backup.

8TB holds more media than I'll ever need, but I do trim movies and shows regularly. For some, 8TB won't be anywhere near enough, and SSDs exceeding this are ridiculously expensive.

We swapped our 2080s for 6800 XTs last year and couldn't be happier...a 7900 GRE should be great for gaming, but I can't speak to LLM performance.

I was able to extract the img from the ISO using geteltorito as described in section 5 of this ArchWiki article. Once you mount the resulting img file, you'll end up with the same file contents achieved by running their Windows BIOS Utility through wine.

The relevant binaries appear to be under the folders, N24ET76P and N24ET76W. Both scan clean for me, for whatever that's worth:

curl -X POST -F'file=@N24ET76P/$0AN2400.FL1' https://pk.fail
{"details":{"analysis-time":"1.395106993s","hashes":{"md5":"ba73792a5fc831ca84b4cd3a21c03247","sha1":"24a5bb42d670c7705aed06588f0092ec11a32564","sha256":"b9510c73657460ae24c550b71d217a543b0fc3c30a3e081eff31d9d8f1a2bdda","sha512":"8ef6f0dcffbca05b79710b8599b1b1c926ee59185a675bc7eeede6da040c751097303ada523611271de6aaf190a597cdd6e9d5cf564d06987abcf712f61227c6"}},"status":"not-vulnerable"}

curl -X POST -F'file=@N24ET76W/$0AN2400.FL1' https://pk.fail
{"details":{"analysis-time":"1.438471526s","hashes":{"md5":"de1551b0bcc73e19375f7111def72278","sha1":"cd41f36d018f940c308a7be25a20e81bdb7e4cf2","sha256":"b3f646095e47bb94f04390c756cb4133201b1231a8b224174f10bb06bd3835f2","sha512":"55143f4903f92d88057bc9d4232b0d328e9ace36330f35fafdf0485d8bebb3f79b9fedc88ab1dec7fc04a8a3e0890887c1dd7632a2ffa397fb0917be90e3f93f"}},"status":"not-vulnerable"}

The linux command mentioned in the Ars Technica article elsewhere here is efi-readvar -v PK. For Fedora and Arch users, efi-readvar is available in the efitools package.

Edit: Clarity

An ISO is just another archive format, similar to zip, tarballs, and rar files. Most modern archive tools can open and/or extract its contents like any other archive.

Edit:

It looks like Lenovo releases their ISOs formatted as a CD image. See: https://workaround.org/article/updating-the-bios-on-lenovo-laptops-from-linux-using-a-usb-flash-stick/

I can't say for certain, but I think you just have to grab the last firmware binary released for your T480 from the Lenovo website and run it through the online validator: https://pk.fail/

If ambient noise is a concern, I'd go with an SSD. If money is tight, an HDD will give you the best value.

My server is in an otherwise quiet home office/sitting room, so I went with an 8TB SSD (870 QVO). Spinning disks make a fair bit of noise just waking up, let alone the actual file operations.

You should be able to layer the xdg-desktop-portal-gnome package, which will also pull any dependencies.

To answer your general question though, yes I believe you can easily install at least minimal versions of each DE with little impact to rpm-ostree performance. They don't need to be separate images, though that's possible too by rebasing and pinning. I would just layer the necessary packages to load a GNOME environment (start with rpm-ostree install gnome-shell). This way everything stays up to date with the active image. For example, I'm running GDM under Kinoite simply because I was having unresolvable issues with SDDM and LightDM.

Pinning separate images would require you to rebase with each image update and then unpin/pin the old/new images...too much work.

Haha, oh I know and I'm all for trying things for the fun of it! Just wondered if there was a practical benefit of such a setup.

Interesting endeavor...any practical benefits? I would think that even a slow USB 2.0 drive would provide better performance than a cloud-based file system.

Craigslist is still superior in the PNW, at least in my experience.