I too struggle to see how immutable distros can benefit the home user. They seem really good for distributed environments like POS, ATMs, Kiosks, etc, due to their ease of rollback, upgrade, etc.
Niri is awesome. I just hope the compositor picks up the speed implementing HDR, high bit rate, color profiles etc… It’s behind other compositors and when I want to watch a HDR movie I have to go to Hyprland.
I love my atomic distro bazzite. Knowing the OS images are tested beforehand and applied without fuzz or manual intervention upon the next boot fits my usecase perfectly. But I get how that doesn’t apply to everyone.
Also those benefits are not unique to the titular atomic distros - similar things can probably be said about e.g. OpenSuse TW with its easy rollback options.
non nerdy people break stuff and can’t fix it, don’t apply updates, etc etc. I can see how an atomic distro would help that. when they reboot they just get fresh updates. They’re basically locked into their home dir because the rest of the system is read only. Sounds nice for regular folks, honestly.
thanks for the niri notes.
I look forward to learning more about atomic et.al.
One thing this distrohop round made clear was limited bandwidth dealing with different distros and learning various package subsystems. To the point of agonizing past time spent nurturing DE settings and .bashrc aliases on a distro that was only installed for a few weeks or months anyway.
If Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS or whatever can solve that better than dotfiles and pacman install scripts on Arch I’ll happily use that.
Maybe Nix is the solution to that problem?
Maybe. Not sure about the family and friends part though, if it can be handed on like a phone or a tablet in a more or less unbreakable state.
The Nixos package manager is also under consideration, independent of choice of distro. First few days on Arch with a AUR hotplug went a bit wild :). Maybe Nixos or Distrobox - ArchWiki is a cleaner way to run ‘all the apps’.
if you’re considering the nix package manager, just go full nixos.
What makes this necessary for you?
An atomic Distro doesn’t reduce the need for customization if you have specific personal preferences. What you could do however is build a custom image using e.g. Bluebuild. You could hone that to your liking.
I’ve now looked a bit further into NixOS and decided that it’s not for me.
Usual user convenience and preferences - app installs and settings, aliases and keyboard shortcuts, browser profiles, password manager etc. As smooth as possible, like switching the same account to a new mobile device.
It might only take a few days to set up but I want to learn how to automate it for myself and others and there’s plenty of FLOSS tools to do so.
Thanks - Bluebuild looks like a match, alongside https://universal-blue.org, looking fw to delve into that.
Maybe it’s time to start a immutable/atomic/nix/guix distro thread.
Some helpful introductions I’d like to share here nevertheless:
Timothee Ravier (Fedora) and Jorge Castro (u-blue, Bluefin, Bazzite) clarifies the terminology - ‘it’s not immutable, you can still modify a lot of things, the whole point is to enable user control of the OS’, ‘composing and declaring a config is really what we do, before building a final system image’
Jorge discusses Matt @TheLinuxCast’s long term Bluefin (a u-blue derivative AFAIK) review - ‘normal users don’t install OS, they buy devices’, ‘Android, ChromeOS & SteamOS are the only commercial successful Linux OS’, ‘3-4% market share over 30 years for traditional Linux distros is a failure because traditional packaging doesn’t work’ - https://youtu.be/YE5mb9oR7mE?t=1085
Richard Brown from OpenSUSE/MicroOS/Aeon is on the same quest - https://aeondesktop.github.io - he’s emphasizing the challenges of the traditional package systems and why containers and Flatpak is a better solution for wider adoption beyond nerds.
https://vanillaos.org is another take, debian based, it didn’t recognize my laptop wlan and apparently requires a +5GB image download to install - https://itsfoss.community/t/installing-testing-vanilla-os2-in-qemu/12185/2
Linus Torvalds spook years ago already on this topic.
As long a major distro’s are doing there own things and don’t start to really work together on the distribution of software, Linux on the Desktop will never really take of. And yes Richard Brown is very very right: People don’t install an OS they buy a devices.
Very different question. I am wondering if there people out here that switched from MacOS to Linux. What distro did you land on?
I had been considering going the UBlue route for a while, but the idea of relying on GitHub or other services for builds kinda turned me off.
Nix is probably the endgame for me but when I tried it in a VM before it immediately turned into multiple projects trying to learn how to do things.
Thinking about going back to Fedora, possibly just installing what I want / need from a minimal install. Cachy has been fine but my install is all goofed up by my own doing, and it’s maybe a little too bleeding edge for me.
Linux Mint, because I wanted it to just work. Haven’t looked back.
I didn’t know anything about distros, so spent about 2 weeks beforehand reading, listening and comparing, since I didn’t want to constantly install and uninstall different distros. Tried a couple in virtual machine too.
Arch - seemed too complex.
Ubuntu - gnome is ugly and in some ways too simplified. Also didn’t like their decisions around snap.
Kubuntu / KDE - was close to choosing this, but opposite to gnome, had too many options, and was a bit buggy.
Debian - stable, but too slow to update.
Opensuse tumbleweed is the other I considered but never got around to trying. Mint has the advantage of having all the debian and Ubuntu packages available.
The biggest headache was trying to understand pros and cons of all the different install options. System packages, snap, appimage, flatpak, ppa, build from source, etc…
For what I have been running so far in my vm: I am leaning towards Gnome… I find KDE actually ugly… Well tastes are all different…
I will not go with Ubuntu, mostly because of the whole span thing.
I the past I have run many RHEL based server (REHL, or centos or recently Alma Linux). So I am very strongly considering Fedora.
You can install all kinds of desktops on Ubuntu (like all major distros). Choosing a Linux distro based on its default desktop environment makes little sense, it’s like choosing a bike based on the bell (or lack of) that they put on the handlebar by default, under the assumption that you could replace or remove it for free within minutes.
Kubuntu is literally Ubuntu with a
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
Similar for Fedora flavors, etc. They are all the same distribution.
Debian. But I switched in 2005 
Depending on how much you are willing to customize your install this may or may not be true. Searching for a distro whose out of the box defaults suit you can have its merit.
I think that the “searching” part (reinstalls) is more costly than customizing a Linux distro to your liking.
Of course, hence why I list kubuntu right underneath.
Yes and no.
If someone doesn’t want to experiment with numerous different DE’s, then it makes sense, and a new convert from Mac might not even understand that switching DE’s is possible.
If they are happy to experiment, then I agree with you, however, it’s easy to read how a certain DE is more suitable for a certain distro, with better performance or fewer bugs etc… if one doesn’t want to wade through all that, then judging a distro based on its default DE is valid.
If I had’ve mentioned kubuntu, lubuntu, xubuntu, etc… someone would have been sure to say, ‘did you try Ubuntu?’. So we see, these distinctions matter.
No, sorry, that’s not a thing. They all use more or less the same codebases from upstream. Maybe some are more conservative about a brand new release, or more diligent about backporting bugfixes, but you pretty much get the same thing on all distros. Just maybe frozen at different points in time as release cycles differ.
What most people don’t get about the Linux ecosystem is how unified it is. Package managers differ (and that can define user experience, it is the most important difference between distros), but beneath all that seemingly fragmented world is more or less the same code. When people distro-hop, they find random manifestations of this, eg Distro X “works” at a given moment in time because that particular release contains a new bugfix, or on the contrary, is before some important transition so it is not affected by something.
Similarly, performance differences are tuning and application choices you can replicate to a large extent on any distro.
So, Linux desktop is just for us nerds Plus those who reject the two main commercial offerings?
That’s ok. There are enough of us to support all the various distros, from largest to smallest. I don’t mind if it doesn’t take off any more than that. I am not evangelical.
Although there is a mischievous part of me that would love to see the tables turned on MS! But that is as much anti-MS as it is pro-Linux. and, as to the real possibility… hey it’s just a dream.