I’ve resisted immutable distros if only because I felt it wasn’t “how linux should be.” That’s probably not even my view because I’ve only used Linux for 3 years, so I’m not some greybeard. I think its been an attitude in online Linux circles that I read and kind of got morphed into.
Today I decided to try KDE Linux. Its still in alpha, so I’m sure I’ll find rough edges, but so far I can do everything I would do on my previous Arch system.
I know with snapper/timeshift you can have the same sort of stability as if you were running an immutable, but it always stresses me out to have a system that can crash. This is all in my head as well because I never had an update mess up my Arch install.
Besides relying on flathub a bunch, everything seems the same, except its an atomic desktop. I’m guessing I’ll struggle with some CLI programs, but I can probably use brew for those. I’m also by no means a power user. I’m a regular user. Use the web, watch videos, music, some games. So I don’t know why I thought I needed access to my core system at all times, even when I never used it.
Anyone else dipping into immutable now that they’ve been around a while? Anyone trying the KDE linux distro?
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Let’s be honest, immutable distros repaired a well meant feature of “do whatever you want”. Yes it is possible on a regular distro doing stuff with the core files, changing or deleting them. But not everyone is prepared for the consequences. That’s where immutable hits in.
The good thing is, whatever you wanted to do with the core system, it’s anyway possible but with distrobox or ostree. But it is separated not integrated.
Only downside is, that it’s flatpak who wins the app package manager fight. Not the best one, but the best we actually have.
Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.
Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.
My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.
I migrated from W11 to Kinoite and NY workflow is similar - flatpak, distrobox (right now I have Arch and Ubuntu boxes for different programs) and only layer essential system wide packages to the ostree.
Its very stable and I seriously enjoy using it. The *how Linux should be" piece is mostly resolves and enhanced by using distrobox.
KDE plasma is awesome and a great DE for a beginner like me.
Were the codecs annoying in Kinoite? I always got thrown off because Aurora came with “batteries included” so I figured Kinoite would be a pain, but maybe its not.
Not at all for me, but my primary use case is audio production. Everything recognized and sync’d on first boot - audio interface, controllers, synthesizers etc. No major driver or codec issues at all.
I use Intel Arc for my GPU and it picked that up right away no need to layer any additional packages. Definitely check around if you’re on nvidia I think that’s the bigger codec issue that is solved by ublue distros
I did run into some issues trying to run my DAW as a flatpak and now have it working well in a distrobox, but that’s largely because I am set on still running some windows plugins via Wine and yabridge…
I’m on opensuse aeon and it is exactly like fedora silverblue, except that it’s rolling. I use flatpaks and install the rest via distrobox. I guess it is the same on KDE linux.
Linux is growing together.
Edit: aeon is european which is why I use it and not fedora. If fedora was european, I probably would use fedora.
I also wanted to try Aeon. I always had issues installing Tumbleweed though. But it looks super nice.
I want to try distrobox as well. Never used it before but I was just reading about it and thinking if I can benefit from it.
For some reason rpmostree always confused, but I’m the type of person to overthink things. Just using flatpak seemed easier, but I know you can pretty much just do that in Silverblue.
Rpm ostree is for system packages. Luckily I rarely need any. Db for everything else
I’ve tried it a couple times since the steam deck came out. Kionoite and Silverblue. Just ended up back on Kubuntu upgrading with every 6 month release. I still use Distrobox. Just don’t feel the need for an atomic base yet. May try again someday but for now I like having a Debian/Ubuntu base and easy option to use PPAs when I want
I would agree with you. That said, bad experiences with things like PPA’s are one the reasons people reach for immutable distros.
I think as soon as you start adding PPA’s to your system, you should consider a distro with a larger repository. But that is just my opinion.
the whole immutable distro idea is just ludicrous to me, in order to upgrade the software, i.e. the new image that got downloaded, I hafta reboot - what the fuck, is this windows 98? I reboot like never, close my laptop or suspend my desktop in the evening and resume in the morning with all my shit how I left it.
it feels like going the wrong way, wasn’t there some progress on hotswapping kernels after upgrade or sumsuch? that was what I thought we were going towards, this feels so awkward and bad on so many levels, nevermind the bloat of getting a whole new OS image because five packages changed… and the cruft and fluff of layering packages and adjacent voodoo, dios mio. basically, everything is way shittier because someone might fuck with /usr/bin or wherever…?
apple did this years ago, with little to no friction. but those fucks update the OS coupla times a year, so dealing with this once a quarter ain’t that big of a deal. apple also ships a stellar backup solution with the system that restores the system perfectly, system and user files, whereas no such thing exists over here.
If you install an app via the built in package manager, yep, you’ll have to restart to update the system image, but for most apps you’ll need (and don’t require deep system integration), you could just use appimage, flatpak or snap, which will all work without a restart. I’ve actually been using immutable distros for many times I’ve used Linux, and once you use it, it’s easy to get used to it unless your use case would work better on standard Linux.
Also, I don’t follow much if the kernel hotswapping feature news, but I do know that for these immutable distros, a pretty great feature is that you can just rebase the entire distro via a single command if you’d like, and you’ll keep all user data. I’ve actually done it on one of my spare laptops, rebasing from fedora kionite to bazzite linux, and it wasn’t awfully fast, it took an hour or so, but I find it impressive nonetheless.
That’s really neat. Maybe a new breed of distrohopper will be born.