Immutable distros are a great invention, and soon I'll be switching to one, once I figure out a couple of things.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Definitely enjoy using my computer and less managing my computer. Trying new things and tinkering is much more liberating with immutables.
Also, not tinkering when you don't want to tinker.
Immutables are too hard for me. I prefer the simplicity of apt.
That's one of those things I'm trying to figure out. They're actually a bit more complicated than your regular distro. They're not that bad, but my mind is not there yet. I need some time to dig into it and learn things. I'm definitely switching eventually.
As someone who started with Slackware in the 90s, it took me a while too.
I switched over to Bazzite from Windows 10 on my main PC because I wanted something I could game on. But, even though most of my games work great on it, I haven't played that many because I ended up just happy to have a Linux system I could use for projects I'd been putting off.
It's true that if you're used to a plain Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora system, you have to do some things differently. But, in exchange you basically never have to worry about installing a package because there's been a vulnerability discovered or something.
The happy medium I found is using distrobox on Bazzite. Inside a distrobox, you can use apt or whatever to manage the software you want. You can even export things from the distrobox to the main OS -- like, say you installed a GUI editor in the distrobox, you can have it available as if it were a normal app in the main immutable OS.
Distrobox might help you switch if you're feeling hesitant. OTOH, if you want to fully grok the system before switching, or want to be able to customize the images you're installing, that can take a while to figure out.
Man, distrobox confused the shit out of me the other day. I admit, I didn't feel like digging and learning it. I just let it go once I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I want to install bazzite in a VM and mess with it for a while until I made sure I know what's going and also make sure that I can get all of my programs. It's going to be all flatpak and I am not a big fan of flatpaks. I know people swear by them, but I avoid them like the plague
Why don't you like flatpaks? I've basically never had any issues with them, but maybe I will in the future.
As for distrobox, what's the confusion? Were you trying to do something advanced? Or, was there an issue with mapping things between the host and distrobox? I haven't really pushed the envelope, but the only issue I've had is that I wanted my shell history to be different between the distrobox and the host, so I had to tweak my zsh startup files to detect if I was in a distrobox and save history in a different place.
Aliases.making.probably
my wife has endured so much waffle about how great nixos is
i feel bad for her
I've used various flavors of Arch for years. I tried Nix and spent several hours failing to do anything - like table-stakes shit like installing packages.
I went back to Arch.
The way out is through
Did you try Nix (on Arch) or NixOS? For the latter, https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-declarative-package-mgmt explains the basic installation.
I clicked on the first link to the options appendix and noped right the fuck out.
That's a level of involvement I reserve for activities where I either get paid 100β¬+/h, or otherwise support my family.
And from what I hear, the main selling point of NixOS is how easy it is to reinstall.
Which I don't do more than once every couple of years.
And then I click "next" a bunch of times on Debian, and copy /home over from my backup.
And from what I hear, the main selling point of NixOS is how easy it is to reinstall.
Well, that isn't the first thing I'd mention, but whatever. Use whatever you're comfortable with.
that isn't the first thing I'd mention
...well, what is? The logo looks nice.
For me, the factors were:
- the ability to split your system configuration into logical modules. Describe one logical thing in one file, no matter how many other factors are involved. Don't want that thing anymore? Just don't reference the module, and all changes will be reverted.
- easily try out new configurations and roll back, regardless of underlying filesystem, without performance penalties.
- the ability to put logic into your configuration (technically, there's no difference between what's typically referred to as configuration and a module in nix, though the latter usually has more "logic" and provides values with lower priority).
- as a consequence, make modules transferable between systems. There's e.g. a Lanzaboote module that enables Secure Boot in a really smart way on NixOS, and the configuration is in my opinion easier than on any other Linux system.
- the reproducibility, from which the "easy reinstallation" follows
The ease of reinstalling is not the main selling point. That's just one of the (imho many) benefits of having a declarative reproducible configuration.
Many people balk at the nix language, which i think isn't that hard to learn, But having to learn just one language/syntax instead of knowing each different application's config syntax is a huge plus for me. Plus you basically get a preprocessor for all configs, which certainly is nice.
Now if you're not a software developer i can see why that would still be a roadblock. But honestly for a pretty straight forward setup, most of it you can just find on the wiki or other places.
I want to like Nix. The idea of declarative managing is super appealing. But I just don't have the time. My dream is to leverage both worlds, a cloud native Nix based OS. Every time I sit down to plan that task it looks daunting though.
I feel this, but my other love is gentoo...if only I could get portage to just stop finding more package masks or multiple instances of the same package slot..it's always something that makes me do another upgrade in an attempt to troubleshoot and it's usually because I get so caught up in just fixing silly mistakes that I forget to actually get to the eselect news that would have avoided the last stack of 6 compounding issues in the first place.
But I love how fun it is and I'm never leaving no matter what other nix-like cults pop up
Between that and never having the money to upgrade my computer I finally had to give up Gentoo after nearly 20 years of use. I keep wanting to go back but its just too painful and I just can't bite the bullet to do a binary install.
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