I’ve got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I’ve been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while… I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.
Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?
Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn’t a favorite these days though).
I wish I had more experience with other immutable distros but Fedora Silverblue has been so stable on both my laptop and PC the past couple years that I haven’t had any reason to try anything else.
Maybe Fedora Silverblue? Bluefin is built on top of Fedora anyways. You will find more support online for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite over Bluefin.
I know Bazzite over Silverblue/Kinoite can make sense so that you can have RPM steam and also not deal with the Nvidia driver hassle on immutable distros, but the advantages of using Bluefin is a bit unclear.
You will find more support online for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite over Bluefin.
And we will be the first to tell you that most of that doesn’t apply.
All distros are immutable if you lost your root password.
I think NixOS is the way to go currently, but I personally would not use it due to the extra amount of work for little to no benefit on a single-user home machine.
I’m currently working on one, will release the website this weekend and the first public in-development build next week. I’m combining the kernels and CPU-specific optimizations from CachyOS (compiled and hosted myself to be in line with their repo policy and licenses) combined with the way SteamOS makes Arch-Linux atomic/immutable, implemented a little more to the way Fedora Silverblue does it. So pretty much unbreakable PLUS fast and optimized.
While the landscape of ‘atomic’ distros may look thriving, we can distill the amount of mature projects to just NixOS, Guix System and Fedora Atomic (and their derivatives).
Most of the other projects found e.g. here are unfortunately not worth your time in most cases.
As for which one to go with, that definitely depends on what you desire out of it (in alphabetical order):
- Do you want something that’s relatively easy to start out with? Then go with Fedora Atomic (or a derivative[1]). From my personal testing, this one also seems to be the friendliest in terms of taking away many footguns.
- If two of the following strike a chord with ya, then you should heavily consider Guix Systems:
- NixOS is the OG[4]. As such, there’s a lot of cruft. But within that mess, somehow, ironically, it holds the potential for setting up the cleanest OS. As you can guess, without a shred of doubt, it is the most mature and most powerful out of the bunch. So, if you’ve got exotic places you’d like to go with your distro, then -in a lot of cases- this is the only viable destination.
I do like lisp a lot. If I were on my desktop, I’d probably be writing this in emacs.
My only experience with NixOS was vicariously through the SystemCrafters guy, who seemed to have no end of trouble with pretty much everything during his youtube videos, but NixOS is kind of intriguing. How is it for software availability?
How is it for software availability?
Assuming you’re asking for NixOS, it’s basically the best; I’m simply unaware of any repo that’s bigger.
Ok, thanks.
thank you chat gpt
Unsure how I should respond to that 😅.
Anyhow, just to be clear, yours truly was responsible for every single letter, word, sentence, paragraph, punctuation (and whatever else I might have forgotten to explicitly mention).
LLM/AI was literally not involved in any part of the writing. Nor in the thought process*.
i see. thank you for your response
Bruh, it’s clearly not AI style. Too elaborate and thought through.
ai elaborate too much tough
I’m a big proponen5 of bazzite. Been daily driving it on my laptop for well over a year (check my post history for details). Never needed to go into the command line to fix anything, never needed to worry about drivers. Basically as stable as windows (not now since windows actually is unstable with their vibe coded updates).
Side question: you bought a laptop but don’t know what specs it has? How did that happen?
I didn’t buy it. I’m just inheriting it from someone that doesn’t want it and isn’t really tech savvy at all. They’re dropping it off on their way through town heading elsewhere. Easier just to check myself when it arrives than try to explain how to find out for me. I just know it’s running windows (10 if I had to guess).
Makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact that you described it as “a refurb” and assumed you had bought something refurbished.
OP doesn’t say they bought it, only it’s coming to them.
