Immutable distros...
I've got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I've been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while... I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.
Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?
Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn't a favorite these days though).
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ClipperDefiance
in reply to Trent • • •The only immutable distro I've tried is Bazzite. It's gaming-oriented, but can work well as a desktop. It also does offer a KDE edition, but for some reason they intentionally ship with some GNOME programs instead of the KDE ones. For example, a fresh KDE edition installation includes Ptyxis instead of Konsole.
Also, DistroWatch's search has the option to only show immutable distros. It's under the Distribution Category option. I figure that might help you find a few more options.
Trent
in reply to ClipperDefiance • • •Mordikan
in reply to Trent • • •I run NixOS as a daily driver and on a box for docker containers.
I will say that it is stable to point that since nothing seems to ever really break, I don't feel I really understand the configuration as well as I could (since I'm not having to fix things and learn).
I started with just traditional NixOS but later moved to using flakes. Because of flakes input pinning, it's much more reproducible but also even more stable. The biggest benefit I see to flakes is the use of local git for updating. Since I have git logs for auditing, if something were to go wrong, I'd just find that change in log and revert to before that commit hash (or just revert to different generation).
The biggest problem I've had is how procedurally some tasks change and sometimes are made more difficult. Symlinks is a good example of that. In Arch, symlinking is just a basic one-liner. In NixOS, it's a matter of writing config more verbosely to the
configuration.nixfile :That's a good takeaway from NixOS: things are more verbose in setup, but tend to get set once and never again.
novafunc
in reply to Mordikan • • •I like Fedora Atomic with bootc for this reason. While Nix language is quite confusing and gets even more confusing when you find online advice that has a different setup than you that introduces compatibilities, bootc is just an OCI containers that I can run bash commands in to get stuff set up.
It's still not one-to-one. Generally, I find that using bash to set things up makes more things easier than harder compared to Nix. Though Nix does make some stuff simpler.
That being said, I haven't tried NixOS in a while. I'm sure that with a decent LLMs, today its easier than ever to make a competent NixOS config. I've been meaning to try, but haven't found the time.
Lemmert
in reply to Trent • • •I run Silverblue on 2 devices (my main computer and laptop) for half a year. It works and I didn't have any major issues with it. Though as you might have experienced with other immutable distros, some things like configuring gdm might be a bit more work. But for most things there is a flatpak. The only software that couldn't be installed that wat was my vpn.
If you want to try out something new, NixOS or Guix might be more up your alley
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
in reply to Trent • • •All distros are immutable if you lost your root password.
I think NixOS is the way to go currently, but I personally would not use it due to the extra amount of work for little to no benefit on a single-user home machine.