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!
is nixos considered immutable or mutable? kind of has characteristics of both.
I’d argue it’s closer to a mutable distro than an immutable one.
Nixos tends to lean on the term reproducible instead of immutable, because you can have settings (e.g files in /etc & ~/.config) changed outside of nix’s purview, it just won’t be reproducible and may be overwritten by nix.
You can build an ‘immutable’ environment on nix, but rather than storing changes as transactions like rpm-ostree, it’ll modify path in /nix/store and symlink it. Sure, you can store the internal representation of those changes in a git repo, but that is not the same thing as the changes themselves; if the nixpkgs implementation of a config option changes, the translation on your machine does too.
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.
That’s a very fair point. But it’s still annoying.
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
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”
I had a systemd unit that ran it weekly after the update one ran. I feel like the default behavior though should be automatic purge old unused runtimes though too. I don’t see why that wouldn’t the case to me.
I’ve even gone so far as wanting to force run time changes underneath the packs because of Caves and such, but thats my niche and puts security over function.
Definitely not a free lunch sys admin wise, but it is still a marked improvement over native apps 98% of the time for me.
NixOS is kinda the best of both worlds, because it does everything in a way that is compatible with an immutable fs, but it doesn’t force you into abiding by immutability yourself.
You can always opt into immutability by using Impermanence, but I’ve never seen any reason to.
Edit: That said, the syntax has a steep learning curve and there are tons of annoying edge cases that spawn out of the measures it takes to properly isolate things. It can be a lot to micromanage, so if you’d rather just use your system more than tinker with it, it may not be a good fit.
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.
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.
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!
And anybody who thinks that Linus doesn’t look for those ways to break Linux is deluding themselves. He’s a fucking asshole.
He can be an asshole, but I believe finding bugs is part of his job.
Would you rather have him find them and complain to a community who might know what they could be, or someone else who will just complain and buy a MacBook instead?
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.
I am a big fan of breaking my system
Stock fedora is just for you my man, it breaks by itself
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Arch doesn’t break by itself tho, well… If you don’t update it for few months then yes, it breaks by itself
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Manjaro enters the room…
Immutable vs Mutable weird normalMore like familiar and unfamiliar
Yeah that’s what they said
N I x o s
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Atomic and declarative. Which is way cooler.
Well it’s a bit confusing. On Guix’ wiki General features you can read:
Guix keeps track of these references automatically so that installed packages can be garbage collected when no other package depends on them - at the cost of greater storage requirements, all upgrades in Guix are guaranteed to be both atomic and can be rolled back.
The roll-back feature of Guix is inherited from the design of Nix and is rarely found in other operating systems, since it requires an unorthodox approach to how the system should function (see MicroOS).
And then on its wiki Guix System (operating system) Roll-back you can read:
This is accomplished by a combination of Guix’s functional package manager, which treats each package and system configuration as an immutable and reproducible entity,[58] and the generation system which maintains a history of system configurations as “generations.”
So the system configurations on a Guix system are actually immutable, as opposed to regular gnu+linux distributions, which can change the system configuration on the fly. What else is immutable on Guix, I can’t tell, but at least you can not change its system configs. What is atomic is the upgrades.
I’m not sure, but as Guix borrowed these properties from Nix, I’d think this applies to Nix as well.
In other words, at least the Guix system has immutable components. And further, the system config which is immutable, is also declarative. Combining those two things might be intimidating, since it’s not like on the fly one can go and change the system config, which might be required when debugging some misbehavior, and it’s what most distros document, then one needs to learn about guile, and a bit about functional programming I guess or at least their basics… Deploying systems might take advantage of such declarative configurations though…
BTW, just in case, not only the system configs are inmutable on Guix, the root/system directory is also read-only making it an inmutable distribution. So the argument that the Guix system is not inmutable is not correct. There are many places clearly stating that, but the itsfoss 12 inmutable linux distributions is one of them, and by its definition of inmutable:
An immutable distro ensures that the operating system’s core remains unchanged. The root file system for an immutable distro remains read-only, making it possible to stay the same across multiple instances.
So Guix is actually an unmutable distribution. But moreover, it’s much more than that.
Solves the issue tho
It’s subjective. I freaking love Bazzite, it works for me. Not the other way around.
Feel like elaborating? I’ve been running it for a couple weeks and very happy so far. One nice little feature was how I can just scroll on top of the little sun icon in the taskbar and my monitors dim and brighten. But that’s prolly a Plasma thing more than anything else.
I use plasma and had no idea this was a thing. Thank you
My new measure for intuitiveness of an interface - do half-drunk, clumsy fumblings with a mouse occasionally reveal a slick new feature I wasn’t aware of?
That’s indeed a Plasma thing
I had to turn it off (which is easy in plasma) because I have two different monitors and they have different brightness, so it was either first one insanely bright to other one being normal or first being normal to second barely dim.
One thing I really like about Bazzite (compared to EndeavourOS which I ran before), is that it just works for gaming. Lots of little tweaks and stuff to get certain qol things working in EOS, are just installed and configured by default in Bazzite.
The stability is super impressive… I used to rely on TimeShift on EOS to roll back when I broke shit (which was over and over, because that’s how I learn), and while it’s trivial to rollback on Bazzite, I’ve never even been close to needing to. It’s just hard to break (and if you do, just reboot it and everything is fine).
It’s definitely more user friendly, but I wouldn’t say immutable like Bazzite is only for non-tech people.
Thanks for the info! So far I’ve been enjoying those same characteristics. I spend my work day arguing with computers, so I have little patience for doing more of it when I’m off (more seriously, I carefully marshall my tech efforts outside of work as a long-term strategy against burnout). I appreciate how “out of the box” gaming (and anything else I’ve tried) works in Bazzite, and the stability has been great too. Though to be fair, def helps that it’s my first experience with Plasma which really makes the “feeling” of the OS pop, in an unfair way lol.
Plasma is awesome! The customizability is just off the charts.
Yesterday I powered up my older laptop (running EndeavourOS) after not starting it up in several months. Had to install the updates in chunks because there were just too many, and the dependency situation was a nightmare… Anyway, got it all updated.
and then next thing I know, I look at the clock and like 3 hours passed. I had been tinkering with shit, completely unnecessarily, for hours without realizing it. I don’t think I really accomplished anything, and in fact may have left it worse off than it was before I turned it on lol.
So yeah, TONS of time saved using Bazzite, but there is that level of tinkering that I do miss at times (DistroBox can help with some things). I don’t even know if I’d say it’s something I “enjoy,” per-se… It just tickles my brain in a certain way that I don’t get elsewhere?
Secure != stable Immutable distros aren’t always more secure but rather more stable and hard to break Also btw nixos can apply updates without rebooting
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.
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’m using Bluefin and overall it’s great. However, there are some unique issues due to immutability and flatpak.
- It’s more difficult to utilize a NAS. For example, on something like Mint, I can open Proton Drive on Firefox, and I can use FF to upload files from my NAS to PD.
On Bluefin, I can access my NAS and all files using the Files app, but not using FF, and I cannot accomplish the above task in the same way. Firefox cannot fully access my NAS, and I have not figured out how to make it work. I’ve played around with Flatseal, but no dice. Instead, I need to use Files to download the files from my NAS to a local folder, and then I can use Firefox to upload to PD from that local folder. I’m guessing there is a better way, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
EDIT: This thread motivated me to try and fix this issue. Installing Firefox using rpm-ostree worked. I expected it would, though I am still hoping to figure this out using the Flatpak version at some point. I also tried using Distrobox/Box Buddy to create a Fedora 40 box and install Firefox there. That version of Firefox couldn’t even see my NAS at all (unlike the Flatpak which could see my NAS but couldn’t upload files from the NAS to Proton). This was my first time ever using Distrobox. I thought it was super cool to see it in action and get a working Firefox, even though I couldn’t use it to access my NAS as hoped.
- I would desperately like to use a screenshot tool with built-in annotations, but I haven’t found a flatpak that works. As I understand, it might have something to do with flatpak combined with Wayland and/or my Nvidia GPU.
So while most things “just work,” there are some problems. Planning to stick with it and keep learning. I do love the concept and I’m overall very happy with everything.
For #1 could you use distrobox to run it with another OS? I’m pretty new to all this so I could be way out in left field lol.
I added this edit above. Pasting here in case you are curious. Cheers.
EDIT: This thread motivated me to try and fix this issue. Installing Firefox using rpm-ostree worked. I expected it would, though I am still hoping to figure this out using the Flatpak version at some point. I also tried using Distrobox/Box Buddy to create a Fedora 40 box and install Firefox there. That version of Firefox couldn’t even see my NAS at all (unlike the Flatpak which could see my NAS but couldn’t upload files from the NAS to Proton). This was my first time ever using Distrobox. I thought it was super cool to see it in action and get a working Firefox, even though I couldn’t use it to access my NAS as hoped.
I haven’t tried any distobox stuff yet but I’m very curious. I will at some point.
Whoever downvoted this is lame. I appreciate your question.
I use Proton Drive on Librewolf on Bluefin without issues, so that seems a little odd. It might be an issue with what access you’ve given the fkatpak. Flatseal is the right place to look.
Are you using librewolf to upload files from your NAS to Proton Drive?
I readily admit I am still not super proficient with flatseal. I spent a lot of time trying to fix this by adjusting the file permissions, but I’m now wondering if it was some other local network setting I missed.
I also don’t use fstab to mount my NAS. I just sign in using Files which creates a smb link. On Firefox/proton drive website I can see the files but I cannot upload them directly to Proton Drive from my NAS using Firefox (or Zen) on bluefin.
In the Filesystem section for that app in Flatseal, you need to add the path to your NAS drive (the same SMB path that it’s mounted in the Files app). That will give your FF flatpak access to that location.
Thanks. I tried that using:
smb://[NAS NAME].local/[FOLDER NAME]/
I copied that path straight out of the Files app. Unfortunately it does not work. There is a yellow exclamation point flag next to it that says “This is not a valid option.”
I ended up installing the rpm-ostree version of Firefox, which accesses my Nas just fine for proton drive uploads. I do hope to eventually figure out how to do this with flatpak/flatseal, but this works for now at least. I appreciate the help!
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 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.
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 tinker
Fair enough but the sole reason I went to Linux is because I despise Microsoft. I wanted a less bloated, not ad ridden, and more customized( mainly just the GUI) experience that gave me more control over my PC. Now I only use this PC for gaming and streaming, so really I just want those two things to work with as little fiddling as possible. Obviously everyone’s use case is different and immutable is definitely not a good choice for power users (from what I’ve read).
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.
There’s Linux-Libre
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?
It is, it’s your machine, it’s YOURS to tinker to your needs
Or yours to not tinker and just use distros default. Right?
Umm sure, mutable ones give you the freedom
How does immitable differ in this case?
Cuz it’s immutable
When I just want it to work for my needs (i.e. using just web browser for most people) there’s no difference. Except immutable is less prone to go wrong.
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.
To You, that’s the keyword here
