I was thinking about going immutable for a long time and now I’m choosing a distro to hop to.
My question is: what are good immutable distros other that Fedora Silverblue spins, UBlue family and NixOS?
Maybe someone uses/used any? What is/was your experience with it?
Don’t use NixOS.
Source:
- I love NixOS
- I use it as my daily driver on multiple machines.
- I’ve contributed both to NixOS and surrounding ecosystem.
Evidence:
- Learning cliff rather than curve because:
- The state of the documentation should have been unacceptable a decade ago. Very unacceptable now.
- The tooling is also over a decade behind.
- Governance leaves a lot to be desired.
These things are getting better but not fast enough that I’d recommend it.
If you really want to look into nix, use it on another distro and see if you’re still interested after getting a flake-based devshell together. (impossible challenge: do it for a python project that relies on complex dependencies like transformers)
Governance leaves a lot to be desired.
Genuine question from somebody who’s out of the loop and doesn’t use NixOS: How does this affect your day to day using the distro?
Basically you hemorrhage contributors because fuck this shit and then core components get more and more behind.
Don’t use NixOS.
I don’t like NixOS very much. This whole governance scandal has turned me away from it even more, tbh.
Bazzite! It’s technically atomic and not fully immutable but I’ve been using it for about a week now (long time I know) and everything just works. Didn’t need to install any extra drivers to get it working with all my peripherals. I like it a lot. Fixed a lot of Wayland issues I was having on previous Ubuntu installs.
Bazzite is cool, but it is part of UBlue family, which I excluded in my post. I’m not a huge fan of Fedora, no offense to anyone using it, tho!
I’m surprised to hear you don’t like Fedora. I recently tried Kinoite and I wish I’d discovered it sooner. I’ve never had a Linux distro that felt so detail-oriented and complete. I’d be curious to hear your reasoning!
It’s complicated and I have a few reasons.
- Last time I used it, Fedora’s updates were too unstable. I twice got updates breaking my system setup. For example, with openSUSE it happened only once (recent broken Mesa update). Also openSUSE updates surprisingly feel more stable than Fedora ones.
- I don’t like Red Hat. Even though I understand that open-source projects are complex and I should separate decelopers from their software, that doesn’t change my opinion on Red Hat.
- This problem stems from the previous ones. Using Fedora I feel like a beta-tester for future Red Hat projects and especially RHEL.
Keep in mind, that I last used Fedora on versions 37–38 and things might have changed since.
I’ve heard good things about VanillaOS. Not used it myself though.
With their package manager apx, you can use software from pretty much any distro in VanillaOS (copied from link above):
Apx is a tool that allows you to generate work environments based on any Linux distribution and seamlessly integrates them with the system in a convenient way …
Does it support any DE other than Gnome? For the rest looks cool!
Does it support any DE other than Gnome? For the rest, looks cool!
Sadly, not officially (atm). I think you need to use a custom image and I don’t know how well those work.
See https://old.reddit.com/r/vanillaos/comments/1d69jn0/want_to_run_vanilla_os_but_no_gnome_de/
That’s a shame. I hope they’ll add support for more DEs in the future.
From OpenSUSE there’s also leap micro. Never used it, but maybe worth looking at.
If you don’t like fedora it might still be worth trying one of the fedora atomics, depending on what you didn’t like. For instance, I could never get used to dnf, but it’s largely irrelevant on an atomic distro anyways.
I would love to see a true atomic Debian-based distro, but I think that’s a long way from maturity.
Edit: opensuse aeon will also be released soon, but at least the comments on this post seem to think that there’s some important things missing from Suse atomic.
From OpenSUSE there’s also leap micro. Never used it, but maybe worth looking at.
I heard of it, but it seems more server/development focused, rather than desktop.
For instance, I could never get used to dnf, but it’s largely irrelevant on an atomic distro anyways.
100% agree, dnf is a bummer. Maybe I’ll give Kinoite a shot, as it has many differences with “vanilla” Fedora.
GNU Guix is the only other one I know about besides the ones you listed.
Guix is interesting, but I need to use proprietary Nvidia drivers to play games and it goes against Guix nature.
There is blendOS which is an arch based immutable distro similar to Vanilla OS with different DE options
