I would just add that nothing forces you to keep the RO image super duper minimal and do everything with flatpak. you can also install the things you want into it and then have them being updated with the rest of the RO image.
plus there is distrobox which allows you do manage container based environments for various things. which could be especially useful for e.g. coding.
Again, I am sure these things make a lot of sense in some contexts.
Itās just that self-managed daily driver desktops probably isnāt one of them. Why would I manage something in distrobox? I already have snapd to dislike, built into Ubuntu 
The Ubuntu blog has an interesting post that compares various immutable architectures. Their approach is, apparently, built around snap.
of course their thing is snap. because that is the tool they are building themself. It is like wondering that Microsoft is saying Windows is the tool of choice.
Of course one would not expect an unbiased evaluation of snap from Ubuntu, but that is not the point ā it can be evaluated on its on merits by the Linux community.
A lot of people dislike the extra indirection introduced by snaps (I am one of them). But pretty much the same arguments apply to all similar solutions. It is quite difficult to argue in favor of Flatpak-based immutable distros (or distrobox, or whatever) but at the same time vehemently dislike Snapd (again, on their technical merits).
Are you an employee of, or affiliated with, SUSE?
yes?
Writing this from my Gentoo machine. I am converted. If Gentoo had more support for a declarative setup it would be the perfect distro in my opinion. I was already thinking of installing it on my other machine, but going through USE flags again for n software is just a big bother. I guess I can create a list of packages like world and group my USE flags in a single file, but itās not as good as nix.
Still need to setup my preferred fonts and a few other bits and bobs but itās almost finished.
Yes, I use NixOS. Not the same concept as immutability as rpm-ostree, but makes a lot of read only things while not taking away your fine grained control. Also itās declarative. Is there a learning curve? Sure. Can I go back to regular ole linux distro? No.
Well, I ran Gentoo for more than a year on a spare PC (my main PC was on Arch Linux). Things would go fine for a few months, then Bang!, some update would mess up the system dependencies. I would try all the prescribed methods to fix them. Sometimes they worked, but a couple of times they didnāt. I would have to stop everything and do a fresh install. After the third time hitting this situation, I gave up on Gentoo.
I do and am happy running bazzite (based on Fedoras Kinoite). We discussed this in this thread before. I converted to linux last fall, started with bazzite, had a tour around vanilla Fedora and went back because I had a bunch of weird issues. These issues probably donāt have anything to do with bazzites atomic nature though ;-). But I like the feeling of having a stable base image to work from.
Even though I am a tinkerer by heart I like to minimize the amount of sysadmin work at home. Having bazzite pull the latest image in the background while I use the PC and having it applied upon next reboot works great for me. Almost everything runs through flatpaks well enough and I only layer Firefox and KeepassXC through rpm-ostree so they can talk to each other.
To adress some of @Tamas_Papp s Points: rpm-ostree-layering should not be the first option as it modifies the base image. One should primarily use flatpaks or distrobox with fedora atomics distros. But yeah, if you are used to apt/dnf install this is annoying. I personally never had any dependency issues with flatpak but maybe I am not seeing the bigger picture.
No. Didnāt even know what it meant until recent weeks. And it didnāt appeal.
I do not doubt that this is true, but note that the official user guide says
Although Flatpak is best suited for GUI apps, Toolbox for CLI apps and package layering for system-level packages, itās ultimately up to you to choose the method that best suits your needs. Thereās nothing wrong in installing CLI apps with Flatpak, or GUI apps with Toolbox, or using package layering only.
which does not even mention Distrobox.
Frankly, that has been my experience with Silverblue in a nutshell: there is a lore you are supposed to know, because when you ask on the forum they tell you that you should not have done this or that, but it is unclear how you are supposed to know this because thatās not what the docs says.
After three discoveries like this I came to the conclusion that this is not really for me, I prefer to get my frutration from Debian & derivatives, in small, occasional doses. If I need to invest a lot of learning into the atomic approach then I will pass for now.
Just to clarify: for me, the single greatest appeal of using Linux is that I get 99% of software via a package management tool, from an official repo, which implies some level of security, bugfixes, consistency, and easy of use. The remaining 1% I am willing to install and update in other ways (eg Flatpak for Darktable).
But as soon as we depart significantly from that model, and I find that I am juggling with 5+ different approaches, including the atomic images, Toolbox/Distrobox (whatever they are? are they even the same thing? or different? if yes, why do we need two of them?), rpm-ostree, Flatpak, etc, my joy in Linux is significantly diminished. (Yes, snap is in this category. I am tolerating it for the 1%.)
Privately, I started with Slackware back when the kernel still had a 0.x version. Then I moved on to SUSE and eventually switched to Debian. There were times when I compiled the kernel daily - not because I needed to, but because I enjoyed it. Crazy times.
At work, Iāve now been running Debian machines for almost 30 years. Privately, I had started using the early Ubuntu versions for a while, but then my old passion for computer games was rekindled, and that led me back to Windows. These days, you can comfortably play almost everything on Linux. The only thing that used to hold me back was the lack of a solid replacement for the software I used for my second passion: photography.
Iāve used and liked Lightroom for about 15 years. But this year, darktable gave me the final push I needed to finally say goodbye to Windows. And I love darktable! 
Even though I have so much experience with Debian, I ventured into Arch - and so far, itās running very well. I wouldnāt recommend it to a complete beginner, though. Honestly, I didnāt have to configure much to be happy with the installation. I chose Arch mainly to always have the most up-to-date software (drivers/kernel etc.), especially because of gaming. Although I couldāve taken the opposite route too: install a stable distro like Debian and compile the cutting-edge stuff myself (or install it via Flatpak).
I use Aurora on a laptop and desktop, and have had a good experience with it. 10 months on the laptop, and 7 on the desktop. Good choice for my needs.
This btw is also the reason why I am not really adventuring much with other distros. I am very talented with breaking things or if something is broken get annoyed enough to go ahead and fix it. (e.g. I often do the blender updates even though I am not actually using it) If i had to do that for even more distros ā¦ so i stick with Tumbleweed. and if I find something in another distro, that I like. I port it over to Tumbleweed 
Iām still in a VM testing phase of my Linux journey. Iāve tried Linux Mint , Ubuntu , Kubuntu , Mx Linux & Fedora Plasma. I keep going back to Mint , love the community around it and if I need help I have a few people in my neighborhood who use it. Ubuntu and Kubuntu were a mess for some reason and slow , iām not sure why that wasā¦maybe the VM? Mx Linux & Fedora were ok to use. I play around with each distro for a month or 2 before moving onto the next.
Iāve now tested 140 apps that Iāve used over the last 5 yrs , I like to include stuff I rarely use just in case I need it. Iām happy to report that of those 140 apps/games , 82 are native , 30 are platinum status with Wine/proton , 15 are gold status , 4 are silver status and 9 are non-functional, but I have alternatives for 6 of those. I could move the other tomorrow if I wanted toā¦I think iāll ride Windows 10 to the End.
IMHO Univeral Blue improves on Fedoras atomic images a lot. I think their motto is that it is fedora atomic āwith batteries includedā which sums it up rather nicely I think. But they are fairly opinionated, so if one prefers to get things right (or wrong :-D) their own way it may not be a fit for you. In their documentation they explain which install variants one should prefer.
This is in conflict with āone package manager to rule them allā and I get why this might be a dealbreaker. But then again nobody is forced to use an atomic distro :-).
I believe the problem for Tamas, and to be fair, in general on Linux Desktop, is that thereās always a sub-distro to fix an issue here and there, but itās never the main upstream distro thatās perfect or wholly focuses on solving those issues.
Itās a hard sell when you want stability and then a distro has a small userbase and an even smaller number of maintainers (some just one or two people). You end up lacking both users to test it and maintainers to maintain. If one or two maintainers gets ill, dies, gets bored of the project, the distro dies or goes down in quality.
Itās true all distros smart out small, and many just take advantage of upstream, but the issues are still present and felt. Linux Desktop just keeps getting more and more complex as time goes on, and creating even more segregation is overall not that efficient and splits the little resources FOSS already has.
Not saying this is the case of Universal Blue of course.
This is the Linux way There will always be thousands of forks and small variations and itās what makes it so good. But for new users I think we should be focusing on recommending upstream distros and not niche ones.
Their Core images for servers look nice My homelab currently runs everything containerized except Caddy. Itās a perfect target for an immutable distro and would also allow me to quickly re-install or move my setup to a different machine if need be.
I support PCās for myself, my wife, and my son. I picked Zorin OS as our distribution (based on Ubuntu). Itās intended to be easy for Windows users to migrate. After initial configuration I get no complaints. It looks good too.
Partly yes. But what I wrote above was a reflection on my (admittedly brief) adventures with immutable distros.
I think that for my purposes, a mainstream distro based on a traditional package manager (think Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, SUSE, Nix, ā¦) is ideal. I have a slight preference for apt, but thatās a detail, the key is that I can just mold my installation to my purposes with minimal effort.
My particular gripe with mini-distros, which includes immutable ones, is exhibited by (no doubt well-meaning and knowledgeable) suggestions like
That is, if you do X, and it does not work out, someone comes along who tells you that the solution is Y. But then Y does not work, but itās OK, Z is meant to address that. And so on and so forth, until you have used up all the letters of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets.
I think that there is a community of micro-distro hoppers who think that the solution for every problem is to create another distribution. I suspect that most of them abandon their latest favorite distro after a short while, because thatās how the game works. It is a fine pastime for those who enjoy it, but I use Linux for work and I am not particularly interested in maintaining it, for me it is a chore and I consider time spent on fixing stuff wasted.
FWIW, I donāt think that the fragmentation is sustainable. I agree with
This, again, is not a problem for people who would have moved on anyway.
I was not familiar with it, but their model of building on Ubuntu LTS seems really smart (and is the opposite of what I describe above). For a particular purpose (typical family computer, non-technical business desktop), updating every 2 years on a predictable schedule is just perfect.
