Opinions on immutable distros

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.

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.

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 :)

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

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

There is no much difference, you just install less shit into the system and basically go 100% flatbox.

Why do all these immutable distros not support use of secure boot and/or TPM. If there was one that made it a breeze to configure this and made using my AURs easy as well I probably could give immutable a chance. But ATM it all looks like I'll have to wait until a major corp like Ubuntu made & supported an immutable version so we can get these quirks hashed out.

Try NixOS.

I think they have a place, but personally speaking, I feel they stifle tinkering. So they're a "no" for me.

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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.

Immutables are an amazing idea. I just wish Arch (EndeavourOS) had it.

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.

If you are bored, no reason to change hahaha. If you want an always running system, use Kinoite.

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.

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

I've been using Kinoite for a couple of years now on my Thinkpad. What would you like to know?

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.

Edit: Tumbleweed is not immutable, you learn something new every day, especially from your mistakes 🙃 (it's still a really nice distro)

Personally really happy with my choice of _Immutable Distro: OpenSuse Tumbleweed. To me, who is half a year into using linux, its very convenient to use an immutable system as IF i were to do a wrong command or whatever its super easy to rollback the system (at least on Suse as it uses btrfs-filesystem). Another thing worth mentioning which is also why I chose to go with immutable is that it really teaches you "the good standards" of where to tinker with files and where not to, at least for a beginner like myself this is very nice.

There are many good comments here and from what I've read immutable seems best suited to the Enterprise IT environment where you don't want the user fiddling with the system, and you want built in rollback and quick configuration. As well as user data protection.

But for Linux users at home I don't see any massive advantage. Especially if you're running a reliable distro like Mint or Debian, or better yet Linux Mint Debian Edition is the best of both worlds.

If you only turn the PC on to watch YouTube, read a document, scan and print, surf the web or game your system should be 100% ok. Unless you're running Manjaro or Arch.

What I don't like about the immutable approach is that it turns my PC into a dumb terminal locked by the distro Devs and updated at their will. It's ok if I have read only on my Android phone because I don't need to get into root etc. That's a good place for immutable.

But I don't want my Linux box at home to be a just an appliance that someone else essentially has control over.

That's very much an Apple approach. Don't let the user see or touch anything. They can just be content to change the wallpaper and add a widget. We'll decide when and how the OS gets updated, what apps they can and cannot run etc.

Ultimately it infringes on user freedom and the very FOSS principles that set Linux apart from the rest.

In short, fine for Enterprise IT but no good for the average Linux user.

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This is why fedora had a little bar after rebooting when I updated right? What am I a Windows user?!? This is the extent of my understanding of immutable distros and I am furious with them.

I personally don't like them. I just keep my system clean and use distrobox and flatpak

Eh, I don't do anything illicit on the internet neither work at NASA or any other high-security-related job... so I'm in the "Lol" side of this whole story.

Compile your commands, kids.

Immutable distros are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property solution.

We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform / BS like Docker / Kubernetes does.

“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.

As with CentOS’s fiasco or Docker it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.

We had good examples of immutable distributions and architectures before as any MIPS router and/or IOT device is usually immutable and there are also reasons why people are moving away from those towards more mutable ARM architectures.