Nvidia RTX graphic card, Valorant, Microsoft Office suite, Adobe Creative Cloud, QuickBooks, AutoCAD, Revit, Visual Studio (full version), DirectX 12-dependent games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Microsoft Teams, Visio, Power BI Desktop, Windows Mixed Reality, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, CorelDRAW, Ubisoft Connect games, Cricut Design Space, MAGIX Vegas Pro, Acronis True Image, some more industry software… just to name a few.

Flatpaks are problematic enough on its own and I avoid them when at all possible.

I’d never want to make my whole system flatpak based. That’s the opposite of what I want.

Let’s answer your question with a question: Why should I reimage my whole tailored home setup, have to learn a different method of doing everything on my system, and ultimately slow my workflow for an atomic system? Sure, it’s cool, but it’s not worth upending everything that I use for. I’m glad it exists, but I don’t currently have a need for it.

I think most users just don’t really know much about atomic distros. A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to really understand the benefits and mention downsides that don’t really exist in most of them. I think eventually (and by that I mean in a VERY long time) atomic distros will become the standard. AerynOS is an upcoming one that seems to have a really amazing blend of it’s atomic features without disrupting the user experience people expect from more typical distros. It won’t replace Nix for me, but I hope it’ll convince a lot of people to try it out.

I use Bazzite on my Steam Deck because I wanted to get LUKS encryption for the hard drive (and otherwise do not wish to manually maintain the computer). I cannot take what is effectively a general purpose PC out and about without encryption. Especially not with the current political climate in my country (USA).

From dealing with SteamOS, I am already familiar enough with how to set up a full dev environment on the immutable distros. So while that is not a challenge for me, it is still a hassle to deal with. I’d rather just directly install my libraries and binaries rather than do workarounds in containers (and then remember the containers).

I think we’ll truly be in the immutable desktop distro future when I can do something like install the base distro image AND simply dnf install something (e.g. nvidia-vaapi-driver or gcc) on top without having to layer it with rpm-ostree. That is, my dnf installs should transparently live on top of the base distro, and that way my base system will never break even if something on top of it does. The problem with layering with rpm-ostree is you are running the risk of a future failed upgrade. It would be like if your MacBook said “sorry, you installed a weird XCode library and therefore we cannot upgrade the OS” – and that should obviously never happen. Restoring my computer to a base state could be as simple as dnf remove * or a GUI option to “Revert to base + keep user files” and that should leave me with a functioning basic system.

Anyway, even though I only use an immutable distro on one device I do see it as the future of Linux desktop computing. I am not up-to-date with the development efforts, but I think we’ll eventually reach a day when using and configuring it, even for advanced users, will be no more difficult than traditional distros. Maybe by 2030 that will be the case.

I made my remarks w.r.t. rpm-ostree and the Fedora family of distros because that’s what I use. Obviously the other immutable distros have their own versions of these tools and their own versions of solving the problems related to them.

I like the fact that linux is so easy to poke around in, even if it breaks. Breaking can be a good thing since that way I learn the most. I enjoy rebuilding my entire setup from time to time. I diskile the additional complexity.

I actually used bazzite as my first mainstream linux distro and I hated it because every second command I pasted in didn’t work and I didn’t understand why. I eventually figured out it was due to the immutable nature of bazzite and began telling everyone to never use bazzite because it doesn’t work very well.

Now I actually understand what the actual upsides are and why it’s different I will change to mainstream distros to actually get a hold of what it’s usually like before considering changing back over.

I’m on Debian stable on my desktop but I tinkered with SteamOS on the SteamDeck, so Arch.

no more “oops I bricked my system” moments

I don’t actually know what that means. If the system because unbootable it’s because I explicitly messed it up, for example by editing fstab or tinkering with GRUB. I honestly can not remember an apt update that broke the system, and I don’t just mean my desktop (which I use daily, to work and play) but even my remote servers running for years.

So… I think that part mostly comes down to trusting the maintainer of the pinned distribution. They are doing their best to avoid dependency hell in a complex setup but typically, if you do select stable, it will actually be stable.

I do have discussions like this every few months on Lemmy and I think most people are confused about what is an OS vs. what is an application. IMHO an application CAN be unstable, e.g. Firefox or the slicer for your 3D printer because you do want the very latest feature for some reason. The underlying building blocks though, e.g. kernel, package manager, arguably drivers, basically the lower down the stack you go, the more far reaching the consequences. So if you genuinely want an unstable system somehow, go for it, but then it is by choice, explicitly, and then I find it hard to understand how one could then not accept the risk of “oops I bricked my system” moment.

I tried Silverblue.
And I wanted to run it without layering, cause everyone tells you to avoid it, since it kinda defeats the purpose of an atomic distro in the first place.

First of all, it was buggy. As an example, automatic updates didn’t work, I had to click the update button and reboot twice for it to actually apply, even though it was activated in the settings.
None of the docs helped (actually, there wasn’t any in-depth documentation at all). And no one had a solution besides “It should actually just work”.
That’s the main advantage (the devs test with the exact same system you run) gone right from the start.

Then Firefox is part of the base image, but it’s Fedora’s version, which doesn’t come with all codecs.
If you install Firefox from Flathub, you now have 2 Firefox’s installed, with identical icons in the GUI. So you need to hide one by deleting its desktop file. Except you can’t. So you have to copy it into your home directory and edit it with a text editor to hide the icon.
Then I went through all the installed programs to replace the Fedora version with the Flathub version, cause what’s the point of Flatpak if I’m using derivative versions? I want what the app’s dev made.

Then it was missing command line tools I’m used to. Installing them in a container didn’t work well cause they need access to the entire system.

Finally, I realized even Gnome Tweaks wasn’t part of the installation, and it isn’t available as Flatpak.
That’s the point where I tipped my hat and went back to Debian. Which isn’t atomic, but never gave me any issues in the first place.

Maybe it’s better now, I was on the previous version. Or maybe the Ublue flavours are better. But I don’t see any reason to start distro-hopping again after that first experience.

Look, I’m a Slacker. It’s not the Slack way.

In my case, I tinker quite a bit when I’m bored, and immutable distros, as well as atomic distros, raise barriers that I’d rather not have to jump over to have my fill of tinkering.

It’s cool but it’s just more hassle than it’s worth at the moment.

Atomic/immutable distros are just another tool in the tool box. It is great for systems with a limited use scenario like the SteamDeck or HTPCs. I also love to install immutable distributions on systems where the user (often IT-illiterate) and the administrator are different people.

On my desktop PC I will, for the foreseeable future, use a normal distro (ArchLinux in my case) but i am planing to look into changing my servers to immutable with docker. That could make updates/maintenance easier and reduce the risk for full server compromises

i’m currently using bazzite and nixos

two very different approaches to atomic, i’m not sure which one is better

one does the stable gaming thing very well and the other does magical things that are very impressive and efficient

honestly don’t know which approach will prove to be most beneficial

I wonder if OP and about 3/4 of the people in here understand the difference between atomic and immutable.