I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can’t mess with the root without extra steps.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don’t want to describe it because I am still learning.
My question is: what does the community think of it?
Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?
Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?
Any other input would be appreciated!
what does the community think of it?
Everyone has their own opinion, personally I think they’re a great idea and have lots of great applications. But just like rolling vs non-rolling release it’s a personal and application dependant choice.
Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?
Again, depends, for my personal computer I wouldn’t use it because I think it could get complicated to get specific things to work, but for closed hardware like the Deck or even a fairly stable desktop used as a gaming system it’s perfect.
Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?
It could, it can also hamper it because people might start to try solutions that only work until next boot and not understanding why, or having problems getting some special hardware to work (more than it would be a mutable distro). But there is a great counter to this which is that once it’s running it will be very difficult to break by user error.
At the end of the day I think it’s a cool technology but that people should know what they’re getting into, just like when choosing rolling vs non-rolling distro, it’s not about what’s better, but what suits your needs best.
From an advertising perspective, it’s important to think about who you’re targeting. Who are your likely customers? Certainly there are some based on the strengths that you raised.
However, some people are definitely not a good target audience, and some people is actually a very large group of people. There are a lot of current and potential users who essentially want the standard major applications to work, and they’re not going to touch the root partition, and they want things to be very simple. For people like that, Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora already do what they want. And these major operating systems have been around for so long that people will naturally be more confident using them, because they were their friends have experience, or because they think the organization has more stability because of its experience.
Of course a lot of things depend on how you define words, but to me the above paragraph describes the mainstream audience, and I don’t think you’re going to have much luck reaching them, because I don’t think the thing you’re trying to sell gives them extra value. In other words, it’s not solving a problem for them, so why should they care.
The whole point of Linux is to tinker, immutable distros destroy the whole point, not to mention, it’s a very windows-approach
Not to mention there’s no guarantee if security even with Immutable distros
The whole point of Linux is to be a FOSS kernel/OS, that’s it.
Anything you want to (legally and morally) do with it is fine and you should not have to conform to arbitrary limitations set by others.
If you think that Linux is only for tinkering, not only are you completely wrong (since most machines running Linux are meant to be stable and not tinkered with, think servers, iot, embedded devices, etc) you are also missing the point of FOSS, since it aims to give the user freedom to do as they see fit, which includes preferring stability and security over tinkering.
I don’t think the point of Linux is to tinker. That would kinda make it for tinkerers only. In my view, the point of Linux is that its a kernel only and you can use it to build an OS around and build one which is easy to tinker with or one which isn’t. Point is, not every system is suited for every task and the Linux kernel allows you to use it how you wish (via distros or you can make your own system around it). Why the gatekeeping?
Not to tinker is a good thing for me at least. Some are Ok using LFS, Gentoo, etc. But distribution like Fedora Silverblue is low maintenance as i just want my task easy and an OS that just works.
Then you have NixOS, which is declarative, and fairly immutable.
You don’t have to reboot to make changes, but you can’t just run unlinked binaries either.
You can’t do things like edit your hosts table or modify the FS for cron jobs. The application store is unwritable, but you can sync new apps into it .
You have to make changes to the config file and run a rebuild as root.
just for clarity: you can modify stuff like hosts or cron jobs but it’d get overwritten iirc? you can also make the change in the config and have it persist (reproducibility being the main point, not disallowing you to edit your files)
No, that file is located in the nix store and linked back, If you become root and try to edit /etc/hosts It will complain that you cannot edit the linked file.
If you go and try to edit the store directly you will meet the same kind of dead ends because /nix/store is a ro bind mount
With enough root access, time and persistence you could eventually unwrap its flavor of immutability which is why I said mostly immutable. Compared to most operating systems where you can just slip a quick edit into a cron job it’s leagues ahead.
I have a really hard time getting Aurora working the way all my other Linux devices so that are running some form of Ubuntu (Mate or Bodhi). With that said, it’s been very stable and i like not being interrupted with packages to install while working on things…
Mixed bag review. I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
I don’t work in tech but I love to tinker , have a home lab etc. I love using Linux for this, been on Linux for close to 20 years.
Got a steam deck little over a year ago, it was my first immutable
I just moved to an immutable silver blue. Been loving it so far. There’s a few things I have issues with, but it’s “just works”. I still distro hop and fuck around breaking my system for fun from time to time, hahahah. But having my main system on immutable has been great.
I’m much more comfortable trying things that I’m not sure will (or expect not to) work. I can just blast the toolbox or whatever afterwards.
Compare to some of my earlier forays into Linux, where I’d do some nonsense and then attempts to remove said nonsense would break some other load-bearing part of the OS.
I don’t mind flatpaks in a pinch, but having to use them for literally every app on my computer is an unreasonable amount of bloat.
The barrier for me is that I use a lot of apps which require native messaging for inter-program communication (keepass browser, citation managers talking to Libreoffice, etc.), and the portal hasn’t been implemented yet. Its been stuck in PR comment hell for years. Looks like its getting close, but flatpak-only is a hard no go for me until then.
Even after that, I would worry about doing some Dev work on atomic distros, and I worry about running into other hard barriers in the future.
But the more apps the more the dedup is saving space
Not when every app decides to use a different point version of the same damn platform.
"Hello Mr. Application. I see you’d like to use the Freedesktop-SDK 23.08.27
“Oh…well hello other application. What’s this? You want to use Freedesktop-SDK 24.08.10? Well…I guess so…”
Edited to add: Yes, I know that flatpaks will upgrade to use updated platforms. But it doesn’t automatically remove the old one, forcing you to have to run flatpak remove --unused every week just to keep your drive clean. That’s hardly user friendly for the average person.
The average person has a 1tb+ drive and doesn’t care about a few hundred megabytes of bloat in a partition they will never look at. If someone is switching from Windows, every app having its dependencies self contained is mostly normal anyway (aside from the occasional system provided dll). The only people likely to care about removing old flatpak platforms are the kind of people who don’t mind running the command to remove them.
The average person has a phone, with 128gb of storage.
The typical laptop I deal with have 512gb ssd drives.
The typical desktop in a corporate environment is 256gb or 512gb.
1tb drives are very much not “average”.
The average person definitely doesn’t have a 1tb drive.
61% of steam users have 1tb or more total hard drive space.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
Steam users are not the “average user”… they are the “average gamer”.
I don’t think Steam users really represent the average person…
The average person doesn’t own a computer anymore, but I think steam users are pretty representative of people who want to use the OS that markets itself as “The next generation of Linux gaming”
That’s a very fair point. But it’s still annoying.
I am a huge fan of immutable distributions, not for my personal daily driver but for secondary systems like my living room/home theater PC.
I heard both flatpak and immutability are obstacles to developers. How bad is it really?
I’ve had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should’ve been dead simple on other distros, I’m really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.
It would be a problem without distrobox. Since that gives you a normal, mutable OS on top, you don’t even notice the immutability.
if you program using vscodium, do you install a separate vscodium in every distrobox?
Yep, I do currently. I only have one main distrobox.
I had a lot of issues on silverblue using vscodium as a flatpak, I think I will try installing it in a distrobox instead.
It should behave pretty much the same as a normally installed version. Hope it works well for you!
And Homebrew. I’m a developer and I’ve done all my work just with Homebrew.
I’ve had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should’ve been dead simple on other distros, I’m really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.
Yes, some toolchain expect you to run pre-compiled dynamically linked binaries. These won’t work on NixOS, you need to either find a way to install the binary from nix and force the toolchain to use it or run
patchelfon it somehow.Or enabling nix-ld can often get such binaries working.
NixOS likely only refused to run it because you weren’t running it in the Nix way. That’s not a jab or anything, Nix has a huge learning curve and requires doing a lot differently. You’re supposed to use devshells whenever doing development. If you want something to just work, you use a container.
Whatever issue you ran into most likely had nothing to do with NixOS being immutable, and was probably caused by the non standard filesystem hierarchy, which prevents random dynamically linked binaries from running.
I’ve never heard of flatpak and immutability being obstacles to developers, in fact I generally hear the opposite. Bluefin is primarily targeted at developers, and some apps will only officially support the flatpak distribution, like Bottles, because of the simplicity and benefits it brings over standard distro packaging.
Same issue, I still use nix on m’y laptop because it’s neat as can be, but I have to admit developing on nix can be quite a hassle if you don’t go it “the nix way”, moreover some packages don’t work as well because nix doesn’t link binaries the standard way (zed editor for example)
Immutable distros are great for applications where you want uniformity for users and protections against users who are a little too curious for their own good.
SteamOS is a perfect use case. You don’t want users easily running scripts on their Steam Decks to install god knows what and potentially wreck their systems, then come to Valve looking for a fix.
Immutable distros solve that issue. Patches and updates for the OS roll out onto effectively identical systems, and if something does break, the update will fail instead of the system. So users will still have a fully functional Steam Deck.
If you’re not very technical, or you aren’t a power user and packaged apps like Flatpaks are available for all your software, then go for it. I prefer to tinker under the hood with my computers, but I also understand and except the risk that creates.
Immutable distros are a valuable part of a larger, vibrant Linux ecosystem IMO.
Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer’s distros. It’s just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.
Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you’re being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don’t like it or it doesn’t work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.
Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I’m new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I’ve rebased three times. It’s really cool to be able to do that.
Don’t know why this would be downvoted. Atomic distro’s are a tinkerers paradise, as all of it can be done fearlessly. I can make stupid changes to configurations that I don’t understand on NixOS, then when things break, simply revert the git commit and rebuild. (Or reboot to the last build if I broke it bad enough).
Who knows. People are passionate about Linux. And downvoting takes no effort. And people downvote stuff randomly.
if something makes linux more secure, safer or easier to use then it’ll be hated because people in the linux community are allergic to all those things. Secure boot? they hate it, wayland? they hate it, immutability? they hate it, flatpaks/sandboxed app? they hate it, gnome? they hate it. Even rust is hated by many.
So Bazzite basically is an immutable 3rd-party SteamOS. It was originally designed for handhelds (though has desktop images now) and includes the Steam Deck’s
gamemodepackage. That means it has the same interface, but working on a Legion Go or an Ally X. If anyone here has* any of those three you should seriously check it out!The other thing as well is that more often than not, the update will succeed and you won’t figure out until the next boot that something is wrong. However, Bazzite has a rollback tool so you can just change back to the previous image, reboot again and get to gaming.
That’s the best reason for immutable for gaming IMO. I don’t want to be fucking around with the OS when I’m in the mood to game. Being able to quickly rollback and jump into things in ~10 minutes or less is how it should be.
I have investigated the idea and came to the conclusion that immutable distros are essentially a research project. They attempt to advance the state-of-art a slight bit but the cost is currently too great.
Perhaps somebody will some day create something that’s worth switching to. But I don’t think that has happened yet, or is happening with any of the current distros. Silverblue might become that with enough polish, but I feel that to get that amount of polish, they would have to make Silverblue the 1st class citizen, i.e. the default install of Fedora.
Immutable, doesn’t mean extreme secure. It’s a false sense of security.
It could be more secure.
But during a runtime, it is possible to overwrite operational memory, mask some syscalls, etc.That’s my 3 cents.
Secure can also mean more resilient. The infosec C-I-A triangle has three legs. Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Immutable distros are more resilient and thus offer better availability in the face of attacks or accidents.
I didn’t know that inflation can affect idiomatic expressions.
Fully agreed. On almost any atomic distro, /home/user is writeable like usual, so any attacker is able to persist itself by editing
~/.bashrcand putting a binary somewhere.it doesn’t allow changes to stuff that needs root access to change. If you have root access you can do anything, including switching images. It is not more secure. It’s not less either
I personally vastly prefer mutable distros for my own system, but I understand the appeal for those who like them. As long as mutable distros remain an option I don’t mind immutable distros.
As long as mutable distros remain an option
Precisely this, linux is about choice. It’s not like suddenly most distros would change init systems and make it near impossible to choose… oh, wait…
I prefer mutable and see immutable mostly as lazyness but if people wanna use’em go for it, i’m not pushing mutable down their throats.Linux isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom. Distro’s don’t owe you the choices you want, because the devs have the freedom to make what they want. You also have the freedom to modify them or make whatever distro you want.
It’s definitely great for the mainstream. Think of Linus Sebastian who has somehow broken every OS except for SteamOS.
It’s not great for me who uses Arch Linux btw with the expectation that if the system doesn’t break on its own, then I will break it myself.
Honestly, I would say it isn’t great for anyone who has to do something low level even once. Now that there are open source nvidia kernel drivers that has solved a pretty big issue for most people who would be interested in immutable distros, but there are still many other drivers and issues that your regular user may face.
One example off the top of my head is that flatpaks specifically can’t ship systemd services if I recall correctly. A lot of wayland apps for thigns like input have to use daemons because of wayland’s security model. Lact for AMD and now Nvidia GPU control, ydotool, or even gui versions of such tools for remapping input.
Snaps require custom kernel modules that aren’t used outside of ubuntu, so I hesitate to trust them regardless of any of the other issues people have with them.
This basically leaves appimages which aren’t available for everything and don’t always seem to work at least not as reliably as flatpak. I even tried to package the rstudio forensic software as an appimage myself, so I could have an easy way to use that proprietary piece of software, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get it to work with distrobox either using the official methods they provide to install it on linux. I did get it working in a chroot for some reason, but it had graphical issues. In the end, I made a PKGBUILD for arch and got it working that way.
The point of all this is that a lot of times people say immutable is great for average, non tech savvy people, but I believe that literally everybody ends up needing to do low level stuff at least once or twice every so often. Which simply isn’t a great experience since you end up having to do layering which throws these theoretical average users right back into the normal complexity of a mutable system, but with even more uncertainty in my opinion.
Now then with all of these caveats. I do still agree that immutable distros are great for the aforementioned group of people and I know this statement contradicts a lot of what I have described above. The reason why I think they are great for the less tech savvy people however isn’t because of any actual technical merit of the systems design though. Immutable distros are great for people like Linus Sebastion because it limits what they can do. You simply have to accept what is there the same way that you have to on proprietary systems like Mac and Windows. Those systems force you to do things a certain way unlike Linux and that is what people like Linus need because they have no business mucking around with the system to begin with.
Lastly, all of this only works because devices like the Steam Deck are being run on specific hardware thus guaranteeing there compatibility. This is what we ultimately need. There would be much less need for low level operations to get drivers or change settings to make wifi or audio work right on a billion different devices if these people were buying linux compatible hardware in the first place.
These are valid concerns but to me they sound more like lack of tooling rather than inherent disadvantages of immutable distros. Linux distros have not historically been designed from the ground up for immutability and it makes sense that there are issues that aren’t handled optimally. Surely we can come up with clean and simple solutions to basic problems like setting up daemons and drivers if we work on it!
You can install packages in immutable distros. It’s just not as easy and recommended as a last resort.
With Universal Blue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) you can install packages with “layering”. It’s basically modifying the image by adding packages on top of what is shipped by the distro, and those packages get added each time the image is updated.
The better, more involved solution is to create your own image from the base image. That gives you a lot more control. You can even remove packages from the base image.
Weird, I don’t have any issues developing custom systemd services or similar on my Kinoite installation. Packages that need to run on the host system can be layered, everything else is running in distrobox.
