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What's up with all these immutable distributions? What are the benefits and disadvantages of them? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?

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[–] 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I love Universal Blue.

It's OCI cloud image based Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite/Serica with extra steps/batteries included.

"The reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop."

But also probably an easier way for Nvidia Fedora users to game on Linux:

Easily roll back deployments or 📌 one and rebase to something else easy peasy. (So many different choices) Test betas with no fear!

I've actually been gaming on Bazzite for two weeks now:

Jorge's Blog:

Media:

If you wanna simply make your own image to share with friends/family:

Universal Blue isn't a distro. It's more of a reimplementation/enhancement of Immutable OCI Cloud Based Images of Fedora.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    People literally made a distro spin that's dedicated to rolling back nvidia drivers.

    Classic nvidia moment right there.

    But Universal Blue does look very interesting, I need to try and use it with distrobox and see if I can hit any walls that aren't there with a classic setup.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Nvidia is just a specific pain point, it's nice to be able to roll back to a specific version of any given deployment.

    It's just more obvious for out-of-tree drivers since that's usually a worse user experience.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    It does take some adjusting- the pitfalls you'd encounter with Distrobox on Universal Blue are the same as Distrobox on any other distro, so first I'd say to try moving your workflow to Flatpak and Distrobox on your current system or a VM and see how it works out. Generally Flatpak is preferred to a rootless Distrobox which is preferred to a rootful one, but sometimes there's not a Flatpak for something (especially command line tools) and you need access to hardware or system level stuff that only a rootful one can do properly.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Flatpaks are already my preferred way of installing random crap, but I did run into a few walls with that. VSCodium for example is unusable because it throws random errors about running out of space or not finding files that are definitely there even after giving it all the permissions via flatseal.

    Proton has a similar thing where windows apps don't detect the amount of free space properly and see 4GB instead, so I guess it's inherent to containers.

    I'll definitely try distrobox on my arch machine, is there anything I need to consider beforehand to not shoot myself in the foot?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Not particularly, the workflow on your Arch system will be the same as any other distro, that's the nice thing about Distrobox.

    I would highly recommend looking into the distrobox-assemble command, though: it lets you declaratively build distroboxes with the packages and config you need on them. I have a personal box which operates as my primary terminal that's automatically destroyed and recreated on every boot. This way, the packages I always use in a terminal are available, and I can add something I need temporarily with no issue without worrying about forgetting about that package being there down the line and causing some weird update failure or general bloat.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    uBlue is great. After using Fedora Silverblue for more than a year I used it to have the same OS on my laptop and desktop. It's works great and is quite simple if your already familiar with building containers. But the constant reboots and rebuilding an image taking minutes made me switch to NixOS.

    The advantage of uBlue over NixOS is imo that the former is configured like any other Linux by placing files in the traditional file system hierarchy (e.g. binaries in /usr/local/bin). NixOS throws most of that over board and makes use of it's own configuration language and package manager. Getting started with uBlue is definitely easier, while NixOS is a time-consuming rabbit hole (not that uBlue isn't...). For a tiling wm setup I definitely think NixOS is the better choice, since changing core system components is quicker.

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