If you're bored, try Nix. It has all the characteristics of an immutable distro, aims for reproducibility, and is complicated enough to keep you amused for months.
Yeah I was thinking about it. Just feels like it might be too much for just day to day use. Without programming and having to reproduce the system on different machines. At least that’s what the comments say in few places lol
Yah, I get that. But lots of people use Nix as a daily desktop driver because it's immutable. It's not hard to set up the first time with some example configs, and if you want to get more complicated, it's certainly an interesting direction and great time sink.
Frankly, I'd try it in a VM first, so you can snapshot it and play, and see what you think. I don't use it myself but I've set it up a few times and it's pretty cool to play with, I might get around to putting it on one of my bare metal desktops one day.
Ugh stop tempting meeee lmao tbf if I set it up in a vm it’d be painless to move to bare metal since I’d have a config already
Give in to the dark side, Luke.
I can’t, I’m reading Nix’ docs
I see many people here wondering, why they should consider an immutable system.
As someone, who thought the same a few months ago, and now chose Silverblue, here are reasons why:
My #1 reason is, that everything is worry free.
Those advantages above don't apply to "normal" OSs, even, if I keep everything in Distrobox and Flatpaks.
Immutable OSs aren't called "The future of Linux" without reason. They usually shouldn't impair anyone, and make the whole Linux ecosystem better in any aspect.
I'm sorry but none of the above sound different from a regular distro. Maybe I haven't got the gist. You can have snapshots and atomic updates on a regular distro, you don't have to reinstall to switch from Gnome to KDE, I can install all kinds of stuff cleanly anyway thanks to package managers, I don't use root often so the system files are effectively read-only as far as I'm concerned, and so on.
As far as security is concerned I don't see the big deal, I mean I get why a read-only OS would in theory be harder to break into but it can still be modified for updates so I guess it's not really "immutable" after all.
What am I missing?
Edit: before anybody points it out, I do know about the rebase layers and I think it's an interesting approach, but ultimately still gets the same results as packages. It may be helpful for distro builders but doesn't make much difference as a user.
You're correct. But, and here's the big but, the whole immutability-thing isn't something the user should be worried about at all.
On Android for example, the system is read-only too, and pretty much nobody cares too, because it was always designed this way and it doesn't inhibit functionality.
It is mainly a big pro for developers in how I see it. See, every installation creates some package drift. One dependency here, one extra program there, no problem.
But in sum, there will accumulate hundreds of "bloat"-packages over the years, which add many unknown vulnerabilities and bugs that are completely individual to your setup.
And then it will begin: a program crashes here, there's your black screen, and every dev on the issue report says " closed, can't replicate". And after an OS-reinstall, it works again.
And if you want to install KDE on Pop!OS for example, it is highly individual and there are still some packages you didn't see, and it will be very buggy.
Some buttons that are misalligned, misconfigured drivers, and so on.
I tried changing the DE on my normal Fedora one time and even though I thought I did everything correct, I had to reinstall due to screen tearing/ flickering, many misconfigurations, and so on.
On Silverblue, it's a process of 5 minutes max, and then my setup will be the same as the one from thousand other people.
Yes you can do all this with regular distros but not as conveniently. Especially cleanly switching from gnome to kde and vice versa is a nightmare. And by switching I mean removing one completely(including dependencies) and installing the other.
Why a nightmare? It should be very easy on any distro with well organized packages. Remove gnome meta-package, install kde meta-package.
its an easy: sudo apt install task-kde-desktop; sudo apt purge task-gnome-desktop; sudo apt autopurge
In testing or unstable this can be a problem though.
I feel like, many people just don't understand exactly how a distro and package managers work. immutable os feels like it allows priotizing only on on a small core part of the distribution which is immutable and slapping everything else on via flatpak or snap.
i don't like it and i sometimes wonder if we are not going backwards with that approach.
Hi! I've been using Fedora Kinoite (and now Bazzite Desktop) for about a year.
I'd say bazzite desktop would be a good fit for you if you want to give an immutable desktop a try. It automatically sets up an arch distrobox for steam and lutris, it even has one click installers for things like oversteer in the post-install welcome screen, it auto-updates and is generally just quite a nice improvement on based Fedora Kinoite.
Immutable distros ARE used differently, you will mostly use flatpaks for basic apps (Although a lot of people do that anyway), but any traditional packages you want to install will be done in distrobox. You CAN overlay packages to the base system, but it should be seen as a last resort.
Let me know if you have any questions :)
Interesting. Standard question, why Kinoite and why Bazzite over others? Aren’t you worried bazzite is more bloated than pure Kinoite? Or is that just my mutable distro fear lol Any resources about distrobox/layering etc you recommend?
I use Kinoite over silverblue and other Fedora versions simply because of the desktop. I choose Fedora atomic over other immutable distros because I simply think it's the easiest/most convenient. VanillaOS might be pretty good, but from what I can tell it's on an Ubuntu/Debian update schedule which isn't what I want. I tried NixOS but it's complexity just wasn't appealing.
I use Bazzite over Kinoite because it has all of the tweaks I want, honestly the amount of "bloat" isn't as crazy as you'd imagine.
I don't have any resources about distrobox unfortunately, but I'm sure they're around.
I can't recommend Silverblue enough.
Thing is: on the "surface" it's not that much different than the "normal" Fedora and it's spins.
So, if you want something hugely different on the base, I'd recommend NixOS instead. Nix feels like "the new Arch" for me and is the tinkerer's dream.
It appears to be very complicated too, so it should keep you "not bored" as you said.
I personally wouldn't use NixOS though, as I am just a "casual" user and don't want to over-complicate everything.
I personally am very happy with Silverblue, especially due to one reason: the ability to rebase to many many images.
As other commenters have stated, there's a project called uBlue.
It allows you to swap out the base OS (everything except "your stuff") with one command, so you can rebase to many different community spins and different desktops cleanly.
The uBlue base OS is just Vanilla SB with some QOL stuff added, like codecs and other stuff. It is really a "just works" distro, that manages itself and functions in the background without you noticing.
The other spins give you different DEs, preconfigured drivers, opinionated approaches to different DEs, a SteamOS clone, and so on...
Absolutely great, 10/10
What do you mean by bored¿? Because you will be similarly bored by silverblue or kinoite. They are built to be stable and somewhat boring
Why do all these immutable distros not support use of secure boot and/or TPM. If there was one that made it a breeze to configure this and made using my AURs easy as well I probably could give immutable a chance. But ATM it all looks like I'll have to wait until a major corp like Ubuntu made & supported an immutable version so we can get these quirks hashed out.
I believe Universal Blue supports Secure Boot, since they specifically went to make it work for even Nvidia users - I'm assuming it works similarly for the non Nvidia variants or maybe just uses Fedora's default keys? I'm not too well versed in how SB works.
Then it also comes with Distrobox so you can just spin up an Arch container and use AUR apps through there.
I think they have a place, but personally speaking, I feel they stifle tinkering. So they're a "no" for me.
I feel the exact opposite -- I feel like they encourage tinkering in their own way, since they offer the ability to much more easily roll back to a known good configuration.
If I didn’t enjoy tinkering, I would use one of the immutable distros, or at least the Fedora versions.
I personally don’t like that they feel like Android or Chrome OS, but I know that is also the draw to them for others.
You can still tinker!
NixOS is pretty complicated, but in my eyes the next-gen Arch.
And Silverblue is still be able to be tinkered with.
See, on immutable systems, you don't change the system itself, but the next image.
Similar to PDFs: you shouldn't change the PDF, but the original document and then export the PDF again.
PDFs aren't bad, but they aren't designed to be edited, and that's their pro.
And with Project uBlue you can create custom images how you want.
You like Hyprland? There's an image exactly with that! You see what I mean :)
Been playing with that Bazannite (sp?) Variant, it works fine, but i am still undecided if learning the ins and puts of it are worth the switch from my Pop_os install.
There was a little bit research and learning to do some tasks, but nothing surprising.
it does seem it boots much slower than my pop_os install, but I think I have it installed on an internal Hybrid HDD that i not yet replaced with a SSD, so that may be the cause.
pop_os boots amazingly fast, not sure what they do to it.
and having to reboot to get stuff updated/installed is a bit annoying, the ability to roll back is the trade off I guess.
However I can't really think of a time that I needed to roll back, perhaps I am just lucky. So the entire roll back feature is something that I don't know if I will ever actually use.
good luck.
I think immutable OSes serve two purposes: For the developer who needs to operate multiple environments at the same time, and for the utter novice who could screw something up otherwise.
This audience, us, is the exactly middle ground. We like tinkering. We like setting things up.
So, I don’t think immutable OSes are for us.
Not true in my opinion.
You can still tweak the image to your liking, you just have to approach it differently.
One of the many things image based OSs offer is peace of mind.
It's just great to know my PC will work just as fine tomorrow as it did today, and I don't have to fix anything.
Immutables are an amazing idea. I just wish Arch (EndeavourOS) had it.
Isn't SteamOS immutable and Arch based? Surely there's also a more general purpose distribution that does that.
There is AstOS although I haven't tried it personally and I'm not sure how well it works.
If you are bored, no reason to change hahaha. If you want an always running system, use Kinoite.
I tried VanillaOS a while ago and was able to get everything working with my usual setup. I think it has the best approach, and when their v2 comes out, I’m probably gonna switch from Fedora.
What made you choose VanillaOS over Fedora spins?
The fact that I can install anything from any distro in their container setup. It makes things really easy to use with wonky stuff that, say, only works with Ubuntu.
I know you can do the same with other tools, but that’s just how their OS works in the first place.
I tried Fedora Silverblue as well as uBlue Linux and it was pretty ok. My favorite though is NixOS. I look forward to trying out blendOS and VanillaOS.
Edit: Tumbleweed is not immutable, you learn something new every day, especially from your mistakes 🙃 (it's still a really nice distro)
Personally really happy with my choice of ~Immutable~ Distro: OpenSuse Tumbleweed. To me, who is half a year into using linux, its very convenient to use an immutable system as IF i were to do a wrong command or whatever its super easy to rollback the system (at least on Suse as it uses btrfs-filesystem). Another thing worth mentioning which is also why I chose to go with immutable is that it really teaches you "the good standards" of where to tinker with files and where not to, at least for a beginner like myself this is very nice.
Tumbleweed isn't immutable
I personally don't like them. I just keep my system clean and use distrobox and flatpak
I've been using Kinoite for a couple of years now on my Thinkpad. What would you like to know?
This is why fedora had a little bar after rebooting when I updated right? What am I a Windows user?!? This is the extent of my understanding of immutable distros and I am furious with them.
I don't know what you mean with your comment?
The progress bar on Gnome-based distros like Fedora and Ubuntu was their offline install.
This increases the likelihood of a successful update without borking your system.
You can always deactivate that or update via terminal.
It has nothing to do with immutable OSs. Actually, most of them even update without you noticing, which is quite convenient imo!
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