this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025

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Immutable Distro Opinions (www.linuxfordevices.com)

submitted 2 days 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] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

I heard both flatpak and immutability are obstacles to developers. How bad is it really?

I've had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should've been dead simple on other distros, I'm really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

NixOS likely only refused to run it because you weren't running it in the Nix way. That's not a jab or anything, Nix has a huge learning curve and requires doing a lot differently. You're supposed to use devshells whenever doing development. If you want something to just work, you use a container.

Whatever issue you ran into most likely had nothing to do with NixOS being immutable, and was probably caused by the non standard filesystem hierarchy, which prevents random dynamically linked binaries from running.

I've never heard of flatpak and immutability being obstacles to developers, in fact I generally hear the opposite. Bluefin is primarily targeted at developers, and some apps will only officially support the flatpak distribution, like Bottles, because of the simplicity and benefits it brings over standard distro packaging.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’ve had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should’ve been dead simple on other distros, I’m really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.

Yes, some toolchain expect you to run pre-compiled dynamically linked binaries. These won't work on NixOS, you need to either find a way to install the binary from nix and force the toolchain to use it or run patchelf on it somehow.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It would be a problem without distrobox. Since that gives you a normal, mutable OS on top, you don't even notice the immutability.

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

And Homebrew. I'm a developer and I've done all my work just with Homebrew.

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So, you're saying that immutable is terrible for system uptime.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

You have to reboot machines to run secure kernel code. High uptime means running outdated, vulnerable system code.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

Uptime is for services, not individual servers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Could you share some pics (without anything private ofc) of bazzite? I wanted to try it but I couldn't use it as live distro. My main problem is arch because I'm used to apt and I find pacman or whatever it uses difficult for me (nothing I can't learn ofc)

I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update

What do you mean? Thanks

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Bazzite comes packaged with the essentials so that anyone can use it without using terminal. Flatpak is enabled by default and this is the best approach. You can check it out below.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/
If you're not comfortable yet using any other terminal package manager other than apt, you can still use bazzite and learn with time. You can install most apps through Discover (KDE) or Gnome software

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Isn't bazzite fedora-based? Meaning you use dnf instead of apt or pacman.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I don't know what it uses and as someone who always used apt, pacman or dnf is hard to understand

Edit: Not that I can't learn.. Just saying is hard for me

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