[vascocosta]

Personally I'm interested in distros with an immutable base system. After decades of a lot of tinkering with all sorts of distros, I value a stable core more than anything else. If I want to tinker and/or install/compile packages I can do so in my $HOME folder.

In fact, this is what I've been doing in other distros, like Debian stable, nevertheless I have no real control of the few updates to the base system with side effects.

This is not the first immutable distro, but it comes from the people who develop my favourite desktop environment, so I'm tempted to give it a try. Especially as it looks more approachable than something like NixOS.

[zozbot234]

Aren't "immutable" distributions really just glorified "live CD's"? Not really seeing the point of them, tbh. It means that users will have to build a custom system image or fiddle with FS overlays just to do system management tasks that are straightforward on all other systems. The single interesting promise of "seamless" A/B updates is a vacuous one, that you could address more effectively on traditional systems by saving a temporary FS snapshot; this would even deduplicate shared data among the two installs, which is very hard to do with these self-contained images.

[mikae1]

It has always been rather insane to me that user facing applications share packages with the base system.

The atomic distro approach works a lot better for me. Would not go back to a "normal" distro from https://getaurora.dev.

[bogwog]

Try it before you criticize it.

> It means that users will have to build a custom system image or fiddle with FS overlays just to do system management tasks that are straightforward on all other systems.

What system management tasks? /etc and /var are usually writeable, which is all you need to configure the software on your system. Overlays are for installing new software on the base system, which is only really necessary for something like nvidia drivers because all other software is installable through other means (it's also usually a trivial process). Even if you don't want to use containers, you can use a separate package manager like Homebrew/Nix/Guix/Pacman/etc.

It requires a bit of a mental shift to adapt to if you're only used to traditional systems. It's kind of like the move from init scripts to systemd: it's objectively an improvement in all the ways that matter, but cultural/emotional push back is inevitable :)

[jzb]

Immutable systems such as this one and Fedora's Atomics and CoreOS/Flatcar have their uses. Whether they make sense for you or for general desktop OSes is another question, but there are many situations where the approach makes a lot of sense.

Really, I don't see a lot of difference between immutable desktop OSes and Android or iOS. That model is not necessarily a bad one when you're rolling out systems that you don't expect the user to need to fiddle with the system management tasks you refer to. If I have 1,000 laptops to manage for a corporate environment, say, or for non-technical users who are not going to fiddle with drivers but might want to install Inkscape (or not).

[speed_spread]

The advantage of immutable distro over custom OS snapshot is that everyone is booting off the same images. It makes support manageable because behaviors are much more likely to be reproducible. This is what stability is about, not just local system image.

[triknomeister]

NO!!!! They are in practice more about keeping the core OS very small and stable and putting all packages outside.

[vascocosta]

Or you can try to install whatever custom packages you need under $HOME, without the need for any special permissions or FS overlays? But yes, saving snapshots is also a good solution.

I guess immutable distros such as this one target people who don't need much customisation and mostly just need what's already there anyway.

[charcircuit]

>just to do system management tasks

End users should not have to do system management at that kind of low level. They should be able to focus on accomplishing what they actually want to do and not have to maintain the system themselves.

>you could address more effectively on traditional systems by saving a temporary FS snapshot

That's an implementation detail. Every modern OS uses essentially snapshots for A/B updates to avoid wasting storage space.

[sergsoares]

I understand that disks snapshots with ZFS for example can cover most part of the needed on recovery scenarios.

But immutable OS are helping in progress some sandbox tools and allowing new workflows to manage the OS (virtualized or not).

[giancarlostoro]

There's Arkane Linux which aims to be atomic as well, and the maintainer snapshots the packages every few days after testing. It's currently mainly managing / focusing on one DE but I could see it including KDE etc in the future if enough volunteers join in. I havent given it a shot yet, I quite love EndeavourOS as is.

[vascocosta]

I didn't know this one, thanks. Looks interesting as well.

[tapoxi]

I switched to Fedora Kinoite about two years ago and it's been a great experience. Updates are mostly invisible to me, I only layer a handful of packages (zsh, fzf, distrobox) and I do development inside of distrobox containers so I don't have weird build dependencies in my base system.

Desktop apps are all Flatpaks, including Steam.

Edit: This comment has been downvoted into the negatives? Did something change about HN culture?

[mikae1]

I switched to https://getaurora.dev, also two years ago, and I'm not going back to a "normal" distro.

Can recommend Bazzite, Bluefin and Aurora which are derived from Atomic Fedora but come with niceties like distrobox and NVIDIA drivers (if you need them).

[vascocosta]

TIL about distrobox. It seems like a really neat way to use containers with good host distro integration.

[balder1991]

If I were to guess, maybe people dislike Flatpack in general? At least that seems to be the case on Reddit’s /r/linux

[indigodaddy]

Been using Bazzite and Project Bluefin on some refurb Dell 7200 2-in-1 I recently picked up and they both work great and really enjoying the experience. They are both part of Universal Blue

[IgorPartola]

So you more or less want a BSD system. Have you tried them? They are a joy to use, can have far better performance than Linux, and have nice and predictable upgrade schedules. The base system is small and very usable out of the box. And documentation tends to be excellent.

In other words, with your requirements what are you still doing on Linux?

[grep_name]

I've been curious about BSD in the past -- the thing that stops me is that I like to play with software that requires containers (docker) and I'm not sure if I'd ever get used to the difference between the core gnu cli utils.

The other thing that worries me is that I've had a lot of trouble building software that mainly supports BSD from source on linux machines. I'm worried if I switch to BSD, a lot of the software I want won't be available in the package manager, which would be fine, but I'm worried that building from source will also be a pain and binary releases for linux will not be compatible. Sounds like a lot of pain to me.

I'd be happy to be corrected if these are non-issues though.

[vascocosta]

A long time ago I have used all BSDs and loved them. Eventually the performance of Linux hooked me back, but I guess it's always a good time to go BSD again. I miss the predictability of the upgrades.

[iamtedd]

What are you talking about? Are you emphasising "bad" for effect, or is this an acronym? Please give examples.

Googling "bad operating system" returns useless results.