what is everyone's opinion on immutable OSes, NixOs, Fedora Silver blue etc
I am not sure how i feel about it in general so far, nixos package manager seems pretty powerful. But im not one to jump on flatpaks. Is this the future of linux though?
Not really interested in turning my desktop systems into Android or a game console. That's what immutable OSes with Flatpack (the cartridges) seem like to me. I like having control.
I think it's fine for embedded devices or something like a Steam Deck where an end user just wants to plug it in and play and not learn Bash scripting. But I'm a bit old school when it comes to my desktop.
You don't lose any control, at least not in Silverblue. You are free to edit your base image and layer stuff on top of it if you wish just like any other distro. All it does is create a separate "branch" off of the ostree. It does defeat the purpose of an immutable OS though, the idea is to keep your base system as "clean" as possible so there's less surface area for bugs. But you can do it.
I've been daily driving NixOS(unstable branch, so rolling release) for about a year now and once you get used to it it's really great. The best thing for me is that whenever I need to reinstall or get a new machine I can just fetch my config from github and be up and running within like an hour
I had to setup email on my host system for what feels like the third time in a decade. I spent three hours tinkering. I am getting really tired of tinkering (not enough to use a Mac) and was thinking if I had a declarative config like NixOS that maybe I could just tinker to get the config working and then use it on all my machines.
No, it really doesn't. Anybody is welcome to start their own seperate flatpakrepo. Fedora already does this. Any organization could do the same, if they chose to.
Most projects haven't found any value in maintaining their own flatpak repositories. We considered it at one point for openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa, but decided it's un-necessary duplication of work.
I very interested in switching to an immutable distro eventually. I've only tried a bit of KDE Kinoite on my laptop and yeah, it's alright. Updates are a bit slow, but other than that it works. I am a bit worried about using it on my desktop because of my Nvidia GPU.
I am already using tons of flatpaks right now. Wanted to see for myself if any of them cause me issues or not and I am pleasantly surprised. So I am surely gonna switch one of these days. Don't know to which distro tho.
I'm using my own silverblue image based on ublue with nix and Home Manager instead of flatpaks. It required a bit of work to get the hardware acceleration working for nix desktop apps but once set up it is great.
Are you building the images in a CI/CD pipeline? And are you running automated tests? That's something I'd find very interesting, but it probably requires quite a bit of work...
Depends on your usage, if you use only flatpak, fedora silverblue would be perfect. If you want to manage multiple computers or you're customizing it, switch to nixos and you won't look back.
But both are different than traditional distros, especially nix. If you already are advanced user of linux, you'd have problems with anything more than installing apps on nix for first time.
I've been using openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa (Formerly openSUSE microOS Desktop) for close to 2 years now, and I don't see any good reason to return to a traditional distribution.
it's not that important if you know what you're doing and don't break your distro.
That may be true for intermediate level users.
Let's go about it this way: Arch for sure is the mutable distro that requires the least fiddling when using it for many years. Much less than any distro that doesn't roll and/or relies on 3rd party repos could ever achieve. Arch only ever has very small hiccups, almost never actually breaks. And yet, after the hundredst time of upgrading the keyring first, recompiling some AUR package because some library changed under its butt or whatever tiniest annoyance, you grow tired of it.
After a decade of usage you know all these things, you have explored every nook and cranny of your OS, the excitement for messing about is over. You just want your computer to take care of itself, because there's nothing entertaining/surprising/interesting in it anymore.
An then an immutable distro becomes very attractive. You get an OS that does its thing, no manual intervention required at all. You can concentrate on the stuff you want/need to do. The OS is not the joyful toy with productivity benefits anymore, just a plain tool. Also here and there you may finally discover some interesting new kinds of bugs or challenges that arise from the new paradigma of containerizing literally everything.
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