I think most users just don’t really know much about atomic distros. A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to really understand the benefits and mention downsides that don’t really exist in most of them. I think eventually (and by that I mean in a VERY long time) atomic distros will become the standard. AerynOS is an upcoming one that seems to have a really amazing blend of it’s atomic features without disrupting the user experience people expect from more typical distros. It won’t replace Nix for me, but I hope it’ll convince a lot of people to try it out.

I like the fact that linux is so easy to poke around in, even if it breaks. Breaking can be a good thing since that way I learn the most. I enjoy rebuilding my entire setup from time to time. I diskile the additional complexity.

I use Bazzite on my Steam Deck because I wanted to get LUKS encryption for the hard drive (and otherwise do not wish to manually maintain the computer). I cannot take what is effectively a general purpose PC out and about without encryption. Especially not with the current political climate in my country (USA).

From dealing with SteamOS, I am already familiar enough with how to set up a full dev environment on the immutable distros. So while that is not a challenge for me, it is still a hassle to deal with. I’d rather just directly install my libraries and binaries rather than do workarounds in containers (and then remember the containers).

I think we’ll truly be in the immutable desktop distro future when I can do something like install the base distro image AND simply dnf install something (e.g. nvidia-vaapi-driver or gcc) on top without having to layer it with rpm-ostree. That is, my dnf installs should transparently live on top of the base distro, and that way my base system will never break even if something on top of it does. The problem with layering with rpm-ostree is you are running the risk of a future failed upgrade. It would be like if your MacBook said “sorry, you installed a weird XCode library and therefore we cannot upgrade the OS” – and that should obviously never happen. Restoring my computer to a base state could be as simple as dnf remove * or a GUI option to “Revert to base + keep user files” and that should leave me with a functioning basic system.

Anyway, even though I only use an immutable distro on one device I do see it as the future of Linux desktop computing. I am not up-to-date with the development efforts, but I think we’ll eventually reach a day when using and configuring it, even for advanced users, will be no more difficult than traditional distros. Maybe by 2030 that will be the case.

I made my remarks w.r.t. rpm-ostree and the Fedora family of distros because that’s what I use. Obviously the other immutable distros have their own versions of these tools and their own versions of solving the problems related to them.

I actually used bazzite as my first mainstream linux distro and I hated it because every second command I pasted in didn’t work and I didn’t understand why. I eventually figured out it was due to the immutable nature of bazzite and began telling everyone to never use bazzite because it doesn’t work very well.

Now I actually understand what the actual upsides are and why it’s different I will change to mainstream distros to actually get a hold of what it’s usually like before considering changing back over.

I’m on Debian stable on my desktop but I tinkered with SteamOS on the SteamDeck, so Arch.

no more “oops I bricked my system” moments

I don’t actually know what that means. If the system because unbootable it’s because I explicitly messed it up, for example by editing fstab or tinkering with GRUB. I honestly can not remember an apt update that broke the system, and I don’t just mean my desktop (which I use daily, to work and play) but even my remote servers running for years.

So… I think that part mostly comes down to trusting the maintainer of the pinned distribution. They are doing their best to avoid dependency hell in a complex setup but typically, if you do select stable, it will actually be stable.

I do have discussions like this every few months on Lemmy and I think most people are confused about what is an OS vs. what is an application. IMHO an application CAN be unstable, e.g. Firefox or the slicer for your 3D printer because you do want the very latest feature for some reason. The underlying building blocks though, e.g. kernel, package manager, arguably drivers, basically the lower down the stack you go, the more far reaching the consequences. So if you genuinely want an unstable system somehow, go for it, but then it is by choice, explicitly, and then I find it hard to understand how one could then not accept the risk of “oops I bricked my system” moment.

I tried Silverblue.
And I wanted to run it without layering, cause everyone tells you to avoid it, since it kinda defeats the purpose of an atomic distro in the first place.

First of all, it was buggy. As an example, automatic updates didn’t work, I had to click the update button and reboot twice for it to actually apply, even though it was activated in the settings.
None of the docs helped (actually, there wasn’t any in-depth documentation at all). And no one had a solution besides “It should actually just work”.
That’s the main advantage (the devs test with the exact same system you run) gone right from the start.

Then Firefox is part of the base image, but it’s Fedora’s version, which doesn’t come with all codecs.
If you install Firefox from Flathub, you now have 2 Firefox’s installed, with identical icons in the GUI. So you need to hide one by deleting its desktop file. Except you can’t. So you have to copy it into your home directory and edit it with a text editor to hide the icon.
Then I went through all the installed programs to replace the Fedora version with the Flathub version, cause what’s the point of Flatpak if I’m using derivative versions? I want what the app’s dev made.

Then it was missing command line tools I’m used to. Installing them in a container didn’t work well cause they need access to the entire system.

Finally, I realized even Gnome Tweaks wasn’t part of the installation, and it isn’t available as Flatpak.
That’s the point where I tipped my hat and went back to Debian. Which isn’t atomic, but never gave me any issues in the first place.

Maybe it’s better now, I was on the previous version. Or maybe the Ublue flavours are better. But I don’t see any reason to start distro-hopping again after that first experience.

I’d have to relearn a bunch of shit.

Don’t feel up to it. I’m so used to my setup.

Even using SteamOS (“Arch but we modded it to be sorta kinda like an immutable distro but not really”) miffs me more than it should.

I have to admit, when it comes to new developments in the Linux world, I tend to live under a rock … never switched to Wayland, not because I have any ideological reservations, but because my favorite WM (a minimalist WM developed by a friend of mine) is available only for Xorg.

I had heard about NixOS before, but until I stumbled upon this thread, I didn’t have a good understanding about what an atomic distro is. Now that I have a bit of an understanding, I guess I can only repeat what others said before, it seems to be solving a problem that I don’t have. I’ve been using rolling release distros for a very long time (at first Gentoo, like, 15 or more years ago, but Arch (btw) for over a decade now, with occasional, typically short stints in Debian-based distros), and the amount of problems caused by updates has been negligible for the last decade (Gentoo overlays 15 years ago could be a pain, for sure).

It does sometimes bother me that my OS config seems to so … static these days, but then again I have so many things going on in life on that I don’t feel a huge need to prioritize changing an OS that feels blazingly fast to use, stable, minimalist, and basically checks all the boxes. It just became my high-productivity comfort zone.

Look, I’m a Slacker. It’s not the Slack way.

Really cool in terms of rebasing and rollback, but Flatpak isn’t there yet (for me at least). Introduces lots of complexity without much benefit for me. They have their uses, but not for me yet. And honestly, I haven’t bricked my system in long enough that I don’t consider it a benefit I really care for.

Don’t get me wrong, they are cool, and I hope development is continued but they aren’t for me just yet.

I haven’t tried them, so I cannot judge, but I’m just afraid I’ll run into issues when I will have to go off the beaten path. Inevitably I’ll have to do something hacky in order to fix some obscure software that the maintainers of the distro didn’t think of, and that’s currently already a big pain. But in such a strict setting it will be even more difficult. There will be no documentation and probably no guide or questions/answers on any forum either.

I’d be willing to try it for a productivity setup if I needed a reinstall, but not for my main PC because I just rely on too many hacks to get shit working.

In my case, I tinker quite a bit when I’m bored, and immutable distros, as well as atomic distros, raise barriers that I’d rather not have to jump over to have my fill of tinkering.

It’s cool but it’s just more hassle than it’s worth at the moment.

Atomic/immutable distros are just another tool in the tool box. It is great for systems with a limited use scenario like the SteamDeck or HTPCs. I also love to install immutable distributions on systems where the user (often IT-illiterate) and the administrator are different people.

On my desktop PC I will, for the foreseeable future, use a normal distro (ArchLinux in my case) but i am planing to look into changing my servers to immutable with docker. That could make updates/maintenance easier and reduce the risk for full server compromises

My current setup works perfectly fine, haven’t bricked my system in half a decade.
The learning curve seems steep. It seems to introduce a lot of complexity without much benefit for me. Docs are sparse and everything that is already out there is written with “traditional” setups in mind.