Sup penguin people.
I’ve been running various flavours and variations of Ubuntu for a while. I find I have to nuke and reset my laptop every 6ish months because things eventually stop working or I get weird bugs.
Recently I’ve been having this on and off problem where the computer just shows a black screen after turning it on. The only way to fix this is to tap keys repeatedly until a console shows up and it seems to kick the computer into gear and log in. Other times I have to restart 2-3 times before it logs me in.
I’ve had a lot of small issues like that (like having to jiggle the volume knob in the sound mixer to get sound working) and I’m wondering if switching to an immutable distro (like bazzite) would solve this apparent config creep.
I have a Steamdeck and it’s been solid and stable ever since I got it. I know it’s running an immutable distro and after researching a little bit it sounds like they can be more stable.
I’m no power user but I play some steam games and run a local 7b LLM and like to have a virtual machine or two for Windows XP emulation for some retro gaming.
Anyone have any opinions? What are your thoughts on immutable distros (like Bazzite)? Pros? Cons? Success/doom stories?
Edit: I’m back baby. 4 months later and still kicking it with Bazzite. Go immutable if you’re a former windows person and needs a computer to just work the way you’d expect without any configuration. I’m running all my steam games and plugging into my usb c dock for mouse keyboard webcam and 2 1080p monitor. I could never get that working on other distros. The future is immutable 🙌
Open your computer and reseat any cables and components that you can.
Maybe even do a memory test with something like MemTest86(?).
Random electric noise and disconnects could cause random corruption issues like this.
Now that you mention it I do get another bug where if I pick up my computer in a certain way it logs me out. I’ve got a Framework 13.
I’ve been using Silverblue and Universal Blue’s images for at least a couple of years now and although there were a couple of rare instances I had to manually intervene with my system due to issues, the experience is considerably better than a traditional distro.
Silverblue is so good, everything works perfectly out of the box on my hardware (Framework 13 AMD). I was worried I was going to forget how to do anything because it was so easy so I had to make a second partition and install OpenBSD
This is promising. I’ve got the exact same laptop as you. Laughing at the need to make things complicated to keep your skills up.
Same, I’ve switched all of my workstations to Kinoite and Silverblue over the past 18 months, and couldn’t be much happier about it.
Vanilla OS 2.0 looks promising in my opinion. But it’s not out yet unfortunately. It’s an immutable distro that has integrated containers for all the main Linux distros. You can for example install Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch stuff on the same machine.
Do you mean that there are integrated virtual machines?
Yeah kinda. A container has a lot better performance than a virtual machine and can interact with your system
no, a container is not a virtual machine. Containers, unlike virtual machines, uses the same kernel as host system. That means you cannot spin up a windows container on linux because windows uses NT kernel and linux uses linux kernel. What containers like that will in fact do is allow you to get applications from different distros as if you were running that distro.
For your use case (windows xp game emulation) there are two options. A virtual machine or using wine. My suggestion is to try first “bottles” and then VM
I had an yearly experience with Nix, but I’m thinking that it is overhead for just a home PC system. You may have more pain with static linkage compared to benefits of Nix reproducability and flexibility. Now is a year I’m on the Fedora Silverblue and this one is a really good balance between complexity and usability.
I have experienced an issue sort of like that in the past, where my computer occasionally won’t do anything other than spin the fans, unless there’s a working connection to a monitor…
I recommend that you transition instead of switching. That way you have a way to roll back If the distro you are trying out proves not to be what you expected.
I’m not sure if your issues are related to the distro(s) used and not to the hardware. But if you wish immutable distros…
You can try to use Ubuntu, but installing all the apps as snaps (and/or flatpaks). That will give you immutable-like experience on a regular Ubuntu installation. Otherwise, I’d recommend to try Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon.
I’d you want immutability and things that just works, snaps are the exact opposite of what he needs. I’m gearing up to swap away from Ubuntu for the same reasons as him, and the snap ecosystem is utterly fucked and accelerating my timetable daily.
I’ve never seen something so damn broken, and it gets more so every update. It’s gotten to the point of where snap store will just straight up log me out of my session out of the blue when it finds an update so it can install it, losing all of my work.
Bazzite has been amazing for me.
I started with the nvidia base which I was getting some flickering on when using Wayland. Switching to x11 at the login screen resolved that for me.
I recently upgraded my GPU with an AMD card this time and re-basing was super easy. Didn’t have to reinstall any apps or mess with drivers.
This year I stopped using Windows 10. I started on NixOS, then tried Zorin, Mint, and now Bazzite. This one is it.
This also happens to be my first foray into KDE and my god I’m liking it so much better than gnome or cinnamon.
I love KDE. So much flexibility and customization.
Unless you’ve absolutely made the kernel or package manager unusable, there should be no need to reinstall an entire Linux OS. It’s not like Windows where the registry changes over time, and the OS will become unstable or quirky. It sounds like you just need to be more diligent about doing things in userspace.
Not OP, but speaking as a Linux newb, what is a “userspace” exactly?
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Anything done locally that only affects your user is userspace. Doing configuration changes in userspace versus globally will reduce the likelihood of you breaking something. So making changes in ~/.local, for example, instead of /usr/local.
versus globally
So is this a matter of personal profiles? Userspace would be anything within a particular user’s space, if you will?
Affected your user and not the system as a whole, yes.
If you want to be a hyper technical dick like the other person responded, the old way to refer to the term “userspace” is basically anything that doesn’t affect the kernel, HOWEVER, it is now more commonly used to refer to specific local user settings, yes. The old reference was way before people starting writing things to be hyper-local to individual users, as things are arranged now.
Thank you for explaining!
For me it’s easier a lot of the time to just reformat and reinstall the OS than to troubleshoot every little problem as they arise. It’s great for learning and I’ve certainly learned a lot along the way but for my use case I just want this computer to work with my stuff right off the bat.
