Been using Silverblue for a couple of years and dipped over to NixOS for a project.
I'm all giddy for immutable systems to take over, because it is truly the safest way a user can run a system. The added bonus being system rollback is built-in by default and not some secondary service.
I'm helping a friend out with his laptop from time to time. They've used Linux Mint XFCE for many years and it's set to auto update. Now I got asked to help since the system stopped auto updating with an error message every boot. Seems like an issue with dpkg but I didn't have time so I don't know how to.fix it yet.
Another device is running Fedora Silverblue for a year or two and the only issue was an update failing because of some dependencie issue. But simply removing all overlayed packages and installing them again fixed it in no time.
I've also been using NixOS for a few months on my pc, laptop and server and it's great. Image based OS aren't flexible enough for my liking but are great for low maintenance setups.
They aren't meant to be "flexible". Immutable means it's static, read only. You replace one image with another.
In the case of Silverblue you install using overlays, like Flatpak or toolbox/podman.
With NixOS you do get images, but in the form of clojures. BUT it also handles environments on a fundamental level, so you don't need to reboot to install new system applications or services.
Have you considered Vanilla OS? There's also uBlue, but I have hopes for Vanilla because it is user-firsf distro, whereas uBlue is more an off-shoot of Silverblue meant for users, but Ruth and same issues as with Silverblue.
Vanilla 2.0 is coming up soon and it seems like a great alternative for people with little to no know-how, or people who don't want to mess around and find out.
Immutable can be flexible, just like NixOS is with nix shell and other features I don't yet know about.
Containers are great but rootless has issues with programs that need capabilties like CAP_NET_RAW, so I also need rootful containers. That's annoying and is an advantage with nix shell.
I'm not a fan of A/B root, which I believe VanillaOS uses. Also an advantage of NixOS is it's big repo.. On Fedora I had to package some programs myself in copr (tried out a less well-known wayland compositor) On NixOS I had to too, but it's far simpler without the need to build on someone else's infrastructure.
Can be, as in NixOS is pretty much the only one, which I already alluded to.
But despite you and me, some average users would benifit from immutable systems, even A/B root.
and follows closest with my political views (I value free software(...)), which Fedora Silverblue is one of the few that provides.
Reading this, anyone would think that red had is not in the middle of a controversy for violating the GPL license.
Fedora is, at least in theory, 100% community maintained and owned.
Red Hat sponsors this project (developers and money), in the hopes, that most of it gets upstreamed to RHEL, acting as a "testing ground".
It happened often, and will happen again many times, that the Fedora team decides against interests of RH.
It's a great symbiosis: we, as a community, get an extremely well maintained and professional distro, and RH gets feedback.
Also, side note, the "advertisement" of the RH-ecosystem works. If it weren't because of CasaOS (the web interface and docker management), I would use Almalinux (RHEL clone) instead of Debian, since I'm just used to Fedora and feel more confident in it.
It's debatable at best.
I've used Fedora kinoite for at least a year now, it's pretty good
Do you game on it?
Yes.
I was just looking at that today. Im in my search to leave ubuntu after 10 years
You can try fedora. The workstation if you love GNOME, otherwise the KDE spin.
Silver blue and Kinoite are the same thing but immutable.
I run Bazzite on my Desktop now, works great for gaming.
Always love TheEvilSkeleton's takes, it feels like I'm reading my own experiences and opinions
(yes, I am saying they're literally me, frfr)
silverblue has irritated me to no end, still need to try nix
Why? Can you elaborate further?
Have you tried uBlue, a custom imaging system for Silverblue?
Did the non-immutable Fedora irritate you too?
regular fedora isn't bad, but I find that silverblue kept getting in my way when in trying to do things. I'm not the biggest fan of regular Fedora don't get me wrong. but it does a lot of things right.
but well in the end I'm just not the biggest fan of any computer system. I just find arch the most tolerable for not getting in my way. I'm actually really looking forward to trying nixOS since I heard it has a lot of flexibility.
Well, if you like Arch and NixOS the most, I think you're a tinkerer/ someone, who likes his OS in one definitive way.
That's totally fine, I love that!
But Silverblue is, I think, more catered towards people who love reliability and prefer it over customization.
I, for example, find SB pretty much perfect how it is.
... well, actually, not 100%.
I use uBlue (main), which is basically a modified image of the Vanilla SB with some minor QOL-tweaks, like a few exchanged apps, automatic updates, and so on.
You can also create your own images with this project, with effects similar to Nix.
But if you want your own, individual, config, Nix is just better.
I'm really excited what immutable distros will bring in the future. I follow them (Nix, SB, VanillaOS, etc.) closely and think, that immutability will be the future of Linux, even if that's a trope.
We already containerized everything and never touched the base OS on servers too for decades now, why not on desktop too?
That's the main advantage of Linux, and we should use that.
Ill try and give ublue a go, One of the main issues I generally have with multiple operating systems is that I'm looking for something with a good out of box user experience for the general user. So far, I find that nobara actually gets the closest to this, so it's what I've been recommending. But if ublue is nice and simple and good enough, I might recommend that instead.
I will personally never use a immutable distro
Why not?
Overly complicated and burdensome. I just use distrobox for anything that is going to pull in a bunch of dependencies
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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