this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025

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Immutable Distro Opinions (www.linuxfordevices.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can't mess with the root without extra steps.

For anyone who isn't familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don't want to describe it because I am still learning.

My question is: what does the community think of it?

Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?

Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?

Any other input would be appreciated!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I have a really hard time getting Aurora working the way all my other Linux devices so that are running some form of Ubuntu (Mate or Bodhi). With that said, it's been very stable and i like not being interrupted with packages to install while working on things...

Mixed bag review. I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I don't work in tech but I love to tinker , have a home lab etc. I love using Linux for this, been on Linux for close to 20 years.

Got a steam deck little over a year ago, it was my first immutable

I just moved to an immutable silver blue. Been loving it so far. There's a few things I have issues with, but it's "just works". I still distro hop and fuck around breaking my system for fun from time to time, hahahah. But having my main system on immutable has been great.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Then you have NixOS, which is declarative, and fairly immutable.

You don't have to reboot to make changes, but you can't just run unlinked binaries either.

You can't do things like edit your hosts table or modify the FS for cron jobs. The application store is unwritable, but you can sync new apps into it .

You have to make changes to the config file and run a rebuild as root.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I'm much more comfortable trying things that I'm not sure will (or expect not to) work. I can just blast the toolbox or whatever afterwards.

Compare to some of my earlier forays into Linux, where I'd do some nonsense and then attempts to remove said nonsense would break some other load-bearing part of the OS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Bazzite is great. I was using Nobara before it, and Solus before that and Bazzite has been the best experience I ever had on Linux, I don't plan on changing distros as long as it remains a thing.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I don't mind flatpaks in a pinch, but having to use them for literally every app on my computer is an unreasonable amount of bloat.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

The barrier for me is that I use a lot of apps which require native messaging for inter-program communication (keepass browser, citation managers talking to Libreoffice, etc.), and the portal hasn't been implemented yet. Its been stuck in PR comment hell for years. Looks like its getting close, but flatpak-only is a hard no go for me until then.

Even after that, I would worry about doing some Dev work on atomic distros, and I worry about running into other hard barriers in the future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But the more apps the more the dedup is saving space

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Not when every app decides to use a different point version of the same damn platform.

"Hello Mr. Application. I see you'd like to use the Freedesktop-SDK 23.08.27

"Oh...well hello other application. What's this? You want to use Freedesktop-SDK 24.08.10? Well....I guess so..."

Edited to add: Yes, I know that flatpaks will upgrade to use updated platforms. But it doesn't automatically remove the old one, forcing you to have to run flatpak remove --unused every week just to keep your drive clean. That's hardly user friendly for the average person.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The average person has a 1tb+ drive and doesn't care about a few hundred megabytes of bloat in a partition they will never look at. If someone is switching from Windows, every app having its dependencies self contained is mostly normal anyway (aside from the occasional system provided dll). The only people likely to care about removing old flatpak platforms are the kind of people who don't mind running the command to remove them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The average person definitely doesn't have a 1tb drive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

61% of steam users have 1tb or more total hard drive space.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think Steam users really represent the average person...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The average person doesn't own a computer anymore, but I think steam users are pretty representative of people who want to use the OS that markets itself as "The next generation of Linux gaming"

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

That's a very fair point. But it's still annoying.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I have investigated the idea and came to the conclusion that immutable distros are essentially a research project. They attempt to advance the state-of-art a slight bit but the cost is currently too great.

Perhaps somebody will some day create something that's worth switching to. But I don't think that has happened yet, or is happening with any of the current distros. Silverblue might become that with enough polish, but I feel that to get that amount of polish, they would have to make Silverblue the 1st class citizen, i.e. the default install of Fedora.

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