I’ve seen a lot of talks on the benefits of immutable distros (specifically Fedora Silverblue) but it always seemed to me as more of a hassle. Has anyone here been daily driving an immutable distro? Would you say it’s worth the effort of getting into?
In my opinion: Yay for people not tech savy, so they can’t bork their system, and it prevent most malware to do damages. Or for special devices, like the Steam Deck!
Nay for thinkerer like me, if I want to uninstall the boot loader, I need the option!!
Yeah that’s my feeling on it too. I think an immutable OS would be great for something like an office, where you can have everyone on the exact same setup that’s way harder for non-techie people to break, and presumably if something does go wrong then the fix will work for everyone.
But yeah I’m too much of a tinkerer to use one on my personal machine.
I don’t like being essentially locked out of the internals. I can understand a lot of developers don’t have an interest in system administration as long as it works for them.
Been using Silverblue for about a year now with no issues, recently rebased to ublue Nvidia for extra stability and some other perks. For my use case (web browsing, document viewing and editing, coding) it’s been perfect. My coding environment lives in an arch linux container, all my other apps are flathub flatpaks
The only immutable “distro” I use is SteamOS on the Steam deck, and already knowing that I will have to re-install networkmanager-openvpn annoys me.
I put together an Ansible playbook to “recover” from SteamOS updates. I use mine for gaming and some software development, and trying to get back Arch packages would be a huge pain without my playbook.
I really wanted to try an arch-based immutable OS. I came across what is now known as “ashos”. It was (and still is) in early development. It relies on btrfs snapshots for its anti-hysteresis properties. The code is mostly Python, but it just uses
os.systemcalls everywhere and often doesn’t do anything to verify exit codes before continuing to the next command. The main developer doesn’t seem very interested in following best-practice conventions of the language he’s working in, so that’s where my interest unfortunately ended.I follow Jorge Castro on fedi, and I see a lot of the points he makes in promoting not only ublue but also immutable distros and related containerization tech in general. To me, it seems like a lot of added complexity and excitement to work around distro-specific problems that I do not have.
Would it be cool to be able to instantaneously re-deploy my machine’s entire environment? Sure, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve borked an Arch install in the thirteen years I’ve been using it: That number is zero.
It’s not black and white. It’s different tools for different jobs. You can get by with either, depending on what you are trying to do.
I’ve been using the same Silverblue installation for about two years (maybe even more than that). Initially, I did a lot of tweaking because I didn’t really know how to approach toolbox and flatpaks, especially because I don’t use Gnome as my desktop environment, so this system went from standard Silverblue to Silverblue+i3 overlayed, then to Silverblue+sway overlayed, recently it got rebased to Sericea and it’s still running like day one. It also got upgraded from version 35(-ish) to 38 still without any issues (well, I did have some issues, but I simply rolled back and that fixed it).
I’m also deploying several Fedora CoreOS servers with a similar level of success, but those mainly tend to just run some containers, so I would say I mess way less with those, it’s been mostly just update/upgrade to the latest, check if podman is still running my containers and let them be.
Isn’t ChromeOS immutable? I see the hype for inbeded devices maybe servers. Other then that it seems like it’s not worth the hassle.
I have very little familiarity with most immutable distros and I don’t know how difficult they are to make necessary configurations to system files. If I can’t change things that need to be changed, that’s an issue for me.
That said, I’ve just started looking at NixOS, which is immutable from my understanding. It looks incredible, because you preconfigure everything exactly how you like in a config file then build the system from that config. It seems like the best of all worlds - total control over your system to configure it how you want, multiple easy fallbacks if you mess something up, no worries about forgetting what changes you’ve made or how to replicate/undo them, and the security and unbreakability of an immutable filesystem. For the first time since I started daily driving Linux, I think I’m going to distro hop.
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For personal desktop use I won’t recommend.
