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!
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.
The average person has a phone, with 128gb of storage.
The typical laptop I deal with have 512gb ssd drives.
The typical desktop in a corporate environment is 256gb or 512gb.
1tb drives are very much not "average".
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
Steam users are not the "average user"... they are the "average gamer".
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"
That's a very fair point. But it's still annoying.