Linux

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

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.

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

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

I jumped. I replaced workstation with silverblue. It feels like installing the early version of the future of linux. From an enduser perspective you do not gain too much going from workstation to silverblue. Yet only if you were already using flatpaks a lot. Installing software into the OS becomes more difficult which is the point. It's not good for tinkering. For tinkering you should use arch. Reducing the possibilities to fuck up the system sounds great for the end user. I love that you can remove everything but from a business point of view and the responsibility I have when recommending an OS, immutability is great. Moreover it's more difficult to install snap which is good as well.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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