Every immutable distro right now
Every immutable distro right now
What's the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
I see lots of people recommending immutable distros to new users as if they are able to debug the inevitable breakages that occur or difficulty installing external programs.
This goes right with recommending Mint for gaming where Wayland is experimental and everything else is behind by several versions.
I'd say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I'm using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn't work on X11, but it hasn't pushed me to another distro just yet...
For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I'd say that actually something "immutable" like Bazzite might be one of the best options.
Yeah this I don't understand. I do use immutable distros and quite like them(Bazzite/Aurora/Kinoite) but I would never recommend them to a new user to Linux. They just work too differently than most other distros so like 90% of the documentation you might find for other programs is pretty much useless. Like if you look up some piece of software and it says use your package manager to install, then what? It's usually easy enough to solve if you read the distro's docs and use their recommended approach(flatpak, brew, AppImage etc) but that's already probably way too advanced for someone new too Linux.
I think half the reason immutable distros started being recommended to people is the fallout after LTT's Linux challenge. I noticed some people presenting immutable distros as the solution to prevent things like accidentally removing the desktop.
Some use an A/B system like Android. Others use more complex systems with image trees.
Package managers differ and also ways you can customize the images before/after downloading.
uBlue for example is heavily based on cloud technology and make building custom images with additional packages very easy.
BlendOS downloads packages and builds an image locally, making it easier to customize.
Others I haven't looked at as close, but I'm sure there are plenty of differences
That's the problem
Why do I need someone on Lemmy to tell me this when they have a whole 10 or so page website that could just as well detail this instead of the usual „Hey, your keyboard works on this distro”?
NixOS is the new “I use arch btw.”
Well, it is pretty nice ..
I use both, btw.
Okay, I get what an immutable distro is. I get it's advantages in security/safety. But can someone please explain why this matters? Like, how much safer is this really? I don't understand the cost/benefit ratio of having an immutable core, especially since compromising the core will probably require fully compromising one or more privileged processes first, at which point it would be game over for a mutable distro as well.
I think the biggest advantage for my use case is the no fuzz aspect. In the rare case something goes wrong I can reboot and select the previous version that worked without a problem. Also the ease of mind knowing I can't really fuck up my machine, as the important parts are immutable. Other than that I enjoy having everything gaming related already configured correctly as I use bazzite - but that's probably also true for non immutable gaming oriented distros.
Honestly, that's the same thing I got with BTRFS+snapper. It creates a snapshot before and after any Package installation. In case anything goes wrong I can just go back to a previous snapshot. And on top of that I can easily install native packages and don't lose any disk space to multiple partitions.
I've come to despise immutable operating systems since first encountering them in Android.
Finally! Thank you. Makes lots of sense. I've fucked up at least two systems in my life by messing with drivers/settings when I didn't know what I was doing. That would have certainly helped. I'll have to check it bazzite. I game too through Steam/Proton and it's not exactly a 100% match in terms of performance when compared to Windows.
It’s mostly useful for stability in appliances and reproducibility in large scale deployments.
IMO, I don’t think immutability makes sense for desktop use. The whole point of a desktop is to make it personalized.
Preventing supply chain attacks for one.
Nix os is on the fence tho. It is immutable, but got hot reload so...
It's not just debatable, it's beside the point. NixOS is declarative, trivially reproducible and natively container-ready, that's what makes it so great.
Guix System is wildly different