Hey! I’m currently on Fedora Workstation and I’m getting bored. Nothing in particular. I’ve heard about immutable distros and I’m thinking about Fedora Kinoite. The idea is interesting but idk if it’s worth it. CPU and GPU are AMD. Mostly used for gaming.
If you’re bored, try Nix. It has all the characteristics of an immutable distro, aims for reproducibility, and is complicated enough to keep you amused for months.
Yeah I was thinking about it. Just feels like it might be too much for just day to day use. Without programming and having to reproduce the system on different machines. At least that’s what the comments say in few places lol
Yah, I get that. But lots of people use Nix as a daily desktop driver because it’s immutable. It’s not hard to set up the first time with some example configs, and if you want to get more complicated, it’s certainly an interesting direction and great time sink.
Frankly, I’d try it in a VM first, so you can snapshot it and play, and see what you think. I don’t use it myself but I’ve set it up a few times and it’s pretty cool to play with, I might get around to putting it on one of my bare metal desktops one day.
Ugh stop tempting meeee lmao tbf if I set it up in a vm it’d be painless to move to bare metal since I’d have a config already
Give in to the dark side, Luke.
I can’t, I’m reading Nix’ docs
Hi! I’ve been using Fedora Kinoite (and now Bazzite Desktop) for about a year.
I’d say bazzite desktop would be a good fit for you if you want to give an immutable desktop a try. It automatically sets up an arch distrobox for steam and lutris, it even has one click installers for things like oversteer in the post-install welcome screen, it auto-updates and is generally just quite a nice improvement on based Fedora Kinoite.
Immutable distros ARE used differently, you will mostly use flatpaks for basic apps (Although a lot of people do that anyway), but any traditional packages you want to install will be done in distrobox. You CAN overlay packages to the base system, but it should be seen as a last resort.
Let me know if you have any questions :)
Interesting. Standard question, why Kinoite and why Bazzite over others? Aren’t you worried bazzite is more bloated than pure Kinoite? Or is that just my mutable distro fear lol Any resources about distrobox/layering etc you recommend?
I use Kinoite over silverblue and other Fedora versions simply because of the desktop. I choose Fedora atomic over other immutable distros because I simply think it’s the easiest/most convenient. VanillaOS might be pretty good, but from what I can tell it’s on an Ubuntu/Debian update schedule which isn’t what I want. I tried NixOS but it’s complexity just wasn’t appealing.
I use Bazzite over Kinoite because it has all of the tweaks I want, honestly the amount of “bloat” isn’t as crazy as you’d imagine.
I don’t have any resources about distrobox unfortunately, but I’m sure they’re around.
Awesome, thanks for the reply. VanillaOS is out then, I really despise anything ubuntu. I’ll try nix on my spare laptop and try Kinoite if that fails. Thanks :)
There is no much difference, you just install less shit into the system and basically go 100% flatbox.
This is what I have been doing for years on my Synology box.
Just a handful of Synology apps (mostly backup and snapshot apps) and all the rest of the ecosystem running in Docker. So the main system is bloatfree.
On Linux desktop, mostly flatpaks installations.
That’s absolutely not true.
Immutable systems aren’t just “normal systems you can’t change”, no, they’re more.They’re image based. So, every OS is the same, giving you better reproducibility, resulting in less bugs, better security and a “fresh” OS after every update.
Your OS accumulates stuff over every update and by just using it over time, and having an image based OS is just better.Immutability has so much more advantages than just keeping the host clean. It has some disadvantages, yes, but for most people out there, way more advantages!
Yeah, I run Silverblue and I never watch back to common distro any more. They say there is a learning curve and they are not for novices… That is absolutely not true, they are easier and the only thing you learn is layering packages, which is same as installing packages in every distro with CLI in terminal lol, what learning curve?
Yep, same. While I’m not a total noob, I also don’t have that much experience. Just that much to confidentially break my system every time and not knowing why or how to fix it.
SB just makes rolling back way easier, or even prevents breaking my system at all.
And as a notorious DE-hopper, it is also very convenient.
I barely notice any drawbacks for me tbh
I see many people here wondering, why they should consider an immutable system.
As someone, who thought the same a few months ago, and now chose Silverblue, here are reasons why:- Atomic updates: never worry about half applied installations anymore. Either your OS updates successfully, or it will just work like before.
- Less bugs and better security: every install is the same, so devs can fix one bug or exploit, recreatable on every system.
- Automatic updates (configurable): they get downloaded by the way, without you noticing. And if you reboot anyway, you boot into your updated OS. No waiting times. The system manages itself.
- Way harder to break
- Changes are easily undoable: if an update breaks anything, you can just select another image and reboot, without recovering anything.
- No junk accumulation over time, the OS is kept clean
- Clear distinction between “your” stuff and the OS
- You can “swap out” the base OS cleanly and keep your stuff. Want KDE? No need to reinstall, just paste one command and delete everything Gnome-related, and you are now on Kinoite.
- Flexibility: choose between dozens of different images, like one that replicates SteamOS or Ubuntu, has the MS Surface kernel build in, offers Hyprland, and so on…
- And much more!
My #1 reason is, that everything is worry free.
Those advantages above don’t apply to “normal” OSs, even, if I keep everything in Distrobox and Flatpaks.
Immutable OSs aren’t called “The future of Linux” without reason. They usually shouldn’t impair anyone, and make the whole Linux ecosystem better in any aspect.
I can’t recommend Silverblue enough.
Thing is: on the “surface” it’s not that much different than the “normal” Fedora and it’s spins.
So, if you want something hugely different on the base, I’d recommend NixOS instead. Nix feels like “the new Arch” for me and is the tinkerer’s dream. It appears to be very complicated too, so it should keep you “not bored” as you said.
I personally wouldn’t use NixOS though, as I am just a “casual” user and don’t want to over-complicate everything.I personally am very happy with Silverblue, especially due to one reason: the ability to rebase to many many images.
As other commenters have stated, there’s a project called uBlue.
It allows you to swap out the base OS (everything except “your stuff”) with one command, so you can rebase to many different community spins and different desktops cleanly.The uBlue base OS is just Vanilla SB with some QOL stuff added, like codecs and other stuff. It is really a “just works” distro, that manages itself and functions in the background without you noticing.
The other spins give you different DEs, preconfigured drivers, opinionated approaches to different DEs, a SteamOS clone, and so on…
Absolutely great, 10/10
I might try Nix first and see how it goes, if that fails I’ll try Kinoite (I prefer KDE :)) thanks for the input :)
If you want to try Nix, go for it!
Feel free to update us all :).When I said Silverblue, I actually meant “atomic Fedora variants”, which include uBlue and Kinoite. You can always switch between those with one command and 2 minutes of download time :)
Well, actually this is not the first time me thinking about NixOS. But I tried reading their docs again and… I CANNOT be asked to deal with this. I’d probably be more likely to do LFS than learn NixOS lol I feel stupid now, saying I’ll try NixOS. As much as I want to, the docs are horrendous
If I didn’t enjoy tinkering, I would use one of the immutable distros, or at least the Fedora versions.
I personally don’t like that they feel like Android or Chrome OS, but I know that is also the draw to them for others.
Been playing with that Bazannite (sp?) Variant, it works fine, but i am still undecided if learning the ins and puts of it are worth the switch from my Pop_os install.
There was a little bit research and learning to do some tasks, but nothing surprising.
it does seem it boots much slower than my pop_os install, but I think I have it installed on an internal Hybrid HDD that i not yet replaced with a SSD, so that may be the cause.
pop_os boots amazingly fast, not sure what they do to it.
and having to reboot to get stuff updated/installed is a bit annoying, the ability to roll back is the trade off I guess.
However I can’t really think of a time that I needed to roll back, perhaps I am just lucky. So the entire roll back feature is something that I don’t know if I will ever actually use.
good luck.
Thanks for the input :)
I tried Fedora Silverblue as well as uBlue Linux and it was pretty ok. My favorite though is NixOS. I look forward to trying out blendOS and VanillaOS.
…and people never name guix.
Oh, I completely forgot about Guix. I definitely want to try it out at some point, but for some reason I feel like it will be more complicated than Nix and it will lack features.
I haven’t used immutables yet, but from what I’ve heard, guix is architecturally extremely similar to nix
It’s similar to Nix in the sense that it’s declarative and can entirely configured in a single config file, but I think the Nix implementation of this concept might be better. Have to try out Guix though.
I think they have a place, but personally speaking, I feel they stifle tinkering. So they’re a “no” for me.
I’ve been using Kinoite for a couple of years now on my Thinkpad. What would you like to know?
How much did you have to adapt to the new app installing workflow? If you know what I mean
I learned quickly that installing apps the traditional way causes pretty major instability. You’re basically rebasing the entire OS via ostree to install one application. After my second nuke and pave due to updates no longer working from me rebasing I took the time to learn toolbox so if a flatpak is not available I can still use an application (containerized) without altering the OS. Toolbox by default pulls in another Fedora install as the app base. I recommend using Alpine instead, much smaller and lighter.
I guess the moral of the story is learn to install applications the correct way, or just don’t use an immutable OS
Noted haha I’ll think about if I want to use Kinoite, Nix is first place rn I think haha
If nearly all of your gui apps are available as a flatpak, it’s simple to adapt. While I was using Silverblue I set my terminal up to launch directly into a distrobox, which gave me a regular container to install apps with a regular package manager (e.g. pacman in my case).
If I used Silverblue today I’d use the Nix package manager (with home manager) to install all my cli apps.
I’m not a a current user of immutable distros, but I’m in the same boat as you. Interested in immutable os’s, running fedora workstation, getting bored.
I’ve been working on independent setups to see how I’d get customization working on an immutable distro. Some combination of containers seems like how I’d go. See this explanation.
For example, I’m running a wayland system, and RemoteApp/Rails on freerdp only works with X. Xwayland is currently broken on my system (installed as fedora 39 *beta). I require this for work. I installed distrobox with debian 12 bookworm, installed the required packages and it works like a charm.
On immutable OS’sI have been watching Vanilla OS for a while. I really like what I see. I’m just not sure what the security posture of it is.
The biggest thing holding me back is Gnome 45. It’s so good. Having an independent prioritized thread for mouse/keys makes it feel so smooth.
I’ve built hyprland and begun adding all the essential pieces to make it a viable replacement for Gnome. I’m not there yet, but once I figure out ad-hoc multi-monitor support with docks, I will be.
*edit
2 points for vanillaOS. What’s the problem with their security? Also, coming from KDE, what’s that about gnome mouse thing you’re talking about? Just curious lol
I don’t have a particular problem with their security, I just don’t have a clear picture of what they’re about yet - and I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve investigated it and found everything’s in order.
Gnome’s mouse thing is about running the human input devices in a separate thread, prioritized over the rest of its spawned processes. The practical upshot is, if your system is chugging under the weight of too many programs, your input won’t be laggy
Fair enough, thanks for honesty. The mouse thing sounds sick, although I have a pretty powerful setup 😜
Yeah, the input thread priority sounds cool and it would be nice on KDE as well, but if you have a faster computer than a potato, I’ll guess you won’t be needing that kind of “optimization”.
I think immutable OSes serve two purposes: For the developer who needs to operate multiple environments at the same time, and for the utter novice who could screw something up otherwise.
This audience, us, is the exactly middle ground. We like tinkering. We like setting things up.
So, I don’t think immutable OSes are for us.
Not true in my opinion.
You can still tweak the image to your liking, you just have to approach it differently.One of the many things image based OSs offer is peace of mind.
It’s just great to know my PC will work just as fine tomorrow as it did today, and I don’t have to fix anything.
I tried VanillaOS a while ago and was able to get everything working with my usual setup. I think it has the best approach, and when their v2 comes out, I’m probably gonna switch from Fedora.
What made you choose VanillaOS over Fedora spins?
The fact that I can install anything from any distro in their container setup. It makes things really easy to use with wonky stuff that, say, only works with Ubuntu.
I know you can do the same with other tools, but that’s just how their OS works in the first place.
Interesting. Any experience with gaming?
I didn’t try, but I did see that you can install Steam, so I’d assume everything would work fine. I saw you said you have AMD graphics, so drivers wouldn’t be a problem.
Awesome, thanks :)
What do you mean by bored¿? Because you will be similarly bored by silverblue or kinoite. They are built to be stable and somewhat boring
Idk, I might be just trying to find something to tinker with, immutable is kind of “new flashy” thing :P
I personally don’t like them. I just keep my system clean and use distrobox and flatpak
