I was thinking about going immutable for a long time and now I’m choosing a distro to hop to.
My question is: what are good immutable distros other than Fedora Silverblue spins, UBlue family and NixOS?
Maybe someone uses/used any? What is/was your experience with it?

  • material_hegel@lemmygrad.ml
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    4 months ago

    Highly recommend Guix, been using it as my daily driver for years now.

    System Crafters has a really nice series on getting it setup the way you want it. I think it’s fixed a lot of stuff that is a little wonky with Nix – proper separation of config-time things and build-time things with g-exps, no putzing with bash scripts, grafting so you can reuse builds even when dependencies get updated, and just general good documentation and hackable culture with a pretty active IRC. They’ve recently added support for also managing your dotfiles the same way you do packages and system config (Guix Home). They’ve also pushed the boundaries of bootstrappability/reproducible builds so far that bitcoin-core is now building on Guix for security.

    The system is pretty well thought through, and has saved me a few times where I would’ve bricked my machine on a mutable distro – now, I can just boot to a previous version of the system from the bootloader whenever my lastest changes are messed up.

  • sergay@discuss.online
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    4 months ago

    Currently, the only projects I’d refer to as (remotely) GA are ChimeraOS, Endless OS, Fedora Atomic, Guix System, NixOS and their derivatives. The rest is, unfortunately, simply not there yet. The closest to these would be openSUSE Aeon. But, if you’d like FDE on your device, then you’d have to forego it for now. Currently, I would advice against relying on any other projects; including Arkane Linux, AshOS, blendOS, carbonOS, MocaccinoOS, Nitrux, openSUSE Kalpa, rlxos and Vanilla OS. Unless, you’re fine dealing with whatever random and fringe issues you may have to face.

    As for the previously mentioned GA ‘immutable’ distros, you don’t like to pursue Fedora Atomic, NixOS and their derivatives for IMO fair reasons. ChimeraOS is primarily an OOTB console experience distro (aka couch gaming) that happens to be ‘immutable’. Therefore, bending it (to become your distro for general use) will definitely be an involved process. But, it’s possible. Likewise, Endless OS is somewhat locked down (beyond what you’d expect from your average ‘immutable’ distro) and has to be bend (at least slightly) in order for it to be more suitable as a daily driver.

    This leaves us with Guix System. IMO, if you want to pursue this right now, then Guix System is simply the only remaining way of going forward. It’s fit to suit whatever needs you’d have and offers access to official documentation that’s at least a decade ahead of the one found for NixOS. However, don’t expect this to be entirely painless; ‘immutable’ distros require (in general) a bit more know-how compared to traditional distros. And within the ‘immutable distros’, Guix System and NixOS are uniquely positioned for how ‘powerful’ they feel compare to (literally) any other distro. But, with great power comes great responsibility. Hence, you should definitely know your shit.

    Finally, if FDE is not a hard requirement for you and if you can live with GNOME and if don’t have qualms against containerizing everything and if you don’t intend to tinker, then you might also consider openSUSE Aeon.

  • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    There’s also the Wayblue family of Wayland distros, based on Ublue.

    It’s hard to say for certain whether a distro will work for your hardware, even the Nvidia-specific images can have bugs related to the Nvidia drivers or their interaction with compositors.

    I’ve used NixOS for a year.

    I also tried Fedora Sway Atomic for a week or so. It mostly worked well, but I eventually found that it’s really hard to use Nix for development on a graphics application, because linking with the system Vulkan drivers is near impossible. The loader used by Nix’s glibc will ignore FHS locations. That seems to rule out a lot of the benefits of using Nix.

    So I gave up on using Nix + Fedora as a failed experiment and went back to NixOS.

    My wish list for Nix, Wayland, and Sway is pretty long. I kinda wish I had the time to make a new distro.

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Secureblue, GnomeOS (if you like updating daily), VanillaOS, AOSP, SteamOS, blendOS, and many more.

  • Dotdev@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    There is blendOS which is an arch based immutable distro similar to Vanilla OS with different DE options

    • Redeven@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Except the installer requires one specific repo mirror to be up, which can’t be customized, which has been down for weeks and the dev isn’t very interested in providing any fix or workaround so a lot of people literally can’t install it.

      It’s a bad suggestion, it’s a beta product not fit for end user consumption yet.