I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can’t mess with the root without extra steps.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don’t want to describe it because I am still learning.
My question is: what does the community think of it?
Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?
Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?
Any other input would be appreciated!
I think it’s good if you have a ton of storage and want to set it and forget it. For me, immutable depresses me. I came to Linux for the tinkering and the ability to do what I please to my system, not to be restricted. That’s just me, though. For handhelds/strictly gaming machine (a Steam machine for example)? I think immutable is the perfect fit for it.
Do you have any examples of the kind of “tinkering” you couldn’t do with an immutable distro? I haven’t run into any restrictions after more than a year.
You can’t even install packages using sudo. You can, but they’ll be overridden on next update.
… why would you want to install packages with
sudo? The proper way is to install them (as a user, not root) usingrpm-ostree, which will layer the packages on top of the image, automatically installing them for every future system as well.You haven’t actually looked into immutable distributions, have you?
I admit that I didn’t know about how rpm-ostree is capable of what you mentioned, but I still don’t like immutables for the other reasons I’ve mentioned. I did look into them and I can’t use them. I like my regular distro
I keep hearing this, but people never elaborate on those “other reasons”. Did I miss where you mentioned them?
You mentioned storage, but AFAIK atomic Fedora doesn’t use more space (unless you keep multiple versions for rolling back).
I don’t want to deal with images. I don’t want to have to be cleaning the system from those images to reclaim my storage. I dislike flatpaks, snaps and appimage on which immutable distros rely. The lack of customization as you can’t modify system files or install traditional packages outside the immutable framework, which limits personal tweaks. Apps availability, not all apps on the planet exist in flatpaks. The learning curve. Having to change the way I interact with my computer completely, I’m too fucking lazy for that and way too cozy where I am. They’re just a burden that I don’t want to deal with and I hope that that’s ok with you. Lmao
Of course it’s ok! You do whatever you want. Though I’d like to clear up a couple of misconceptions:
I don’t want to deal with images. I don’t want to have to be cleaning the system from those images to reclaim my storage.
You don’t have to, happens automatically.
I dislike flatpaks, snaps and appimage on which immutable distros rely.
Fair, though you don’t have to use them at all - you could run everything in a distrobox.
The lack of customization as you can’t modify system files or install traditional packages outside the immutable framework, which limits personal tweaks.
This really depends on what system files you mean. Anything in
/etc/? Fully writable. Everything is configurable either in your home directory or in/etc/, so I haven’t run into any issues with not being able to modify something - and if you do run into that, you always have distrobox.Apps availability, not all apps on the planet exist in flatpaks.
Don’t need to, you have distrobox for that.
The learning curve.
That’s fair. It’s been very small for me, and the issues have helped me become a better Linux developer, but it does bring its own problems in some cases.
Having to change the way I interact with my computer completely, I’m too fucking lazy for that and way too cozy where I am.
That’s the thing, I hear this a lot, and I just don’t know what the big changes are. I installed Kinoite, set up a distrobox, and have been smooth sailing since - all my previous installations have had far more issues, and I just haven’t really changed much (besides switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, but I’m happy about that, fuck Canonical).
is nixos considered immutable or mutable? kind of has characteristics of both.
nixos and guix are immutable and two of the only immutable distros I like
The store is immutable but the system itself definitely isn’t.
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Packages in nix are in the store directory, each package in a dir named after the package hash. So you can have 15 versions of firefox installed, for instance, and the different versions go in different folders with different hashnames.
When it’s time to set up a user env, their specific version of firefox is (conceptually) symlinked into the users profile. When that user executes firefox it gets one out of the 15 versions. Another user may get a different one.
Anyway, the package store is off limits to users, and a real bad idea to modify for root too.
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That’s not what sandboxed means and Nix isn’t sandboxed.
Sandboxed means it runs in a separate container, often with limited permissions; raising security at the cost of performance.
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I’d argue it’s closer to a mutable distro than an immutable one.
Nixos tends to lean on the term reproducible instead of immutable, because you can have settings (e.g files in /etc & ~/.config) changed outside of nix’s purview, it just won’t be reproducible and may be overwritten by nix.
You can build an ‘immutable’ environment on nix, but rather than storing changes as transactions like rpm-ostree, it’ll modify path in /nix/store and symlink it. Sure, you can store the internal representation of those changes in a git repo, but that is not the same thing as the changes themselves; if the nixpkgs implementation of a config option changes, the translation on your machine does too.
Nixos tends to lean on the term reproducible instead of immutable, because you can have settings (e.g files in /etc & ~/.config) changed outside of nix’s purview, it just won’t be reproducible and may be overwritten by nix.
Interesting. If possible, could you more explicitly draw comparisons on how this isn’t quite the same over on say Fedora Atomic? Like, sure changes of
/etcare (at least by default) being kept track of. But you indeed can change it.libostreedoesn’t even care what you do in your home folder. Thus, changes to e.g.~/.config(and everything else in/var[1]) are kept nowhere else by default.
- Which happens to be more crowded than on other distros as folders like
/optare actually found here as well.
~/.config is probably a poor comparison on my part; it’s management is actually done by home-manager rather than Nixos proper, and I can’t think of another OS that fills this same role.
Nixos generates (for example) /etc/systemd/network to a path in /nix/store and symlinks it to it’s appropriate locations. After the files are generated the appropriate /nix/store paths are (re-mounted? Over-mounted? I’m not sure the implementation) made read-only (by default), but anything that isn’t generated is absolutely both mutable and untracked, and that “not tracking everything in /etc” is more what I’m going on about.
If you use Nixos as intended (when you find that a package is lacking a config option you want, create your own nix option internally) the distro is effectively immutable, but if you use Nixos for anything moderately complex that changes frequently e.g. a desktop os, you eventually run into the choice: become competent enough to basically be a nixpkgs contributor, or abandon absolute immutability.
I think the first option is worth it, and did go down that route, but it is unreasonable to expect the average Linux consumer to do so, and so something like fedora atomic is going to remain more “immutable” for them than nixos.
This need to git gud is thankfully lessening with every commit to nixpkgs, and most people can already get to most places without writing their own set of nix options or learning how to parse //random markup language// into nix, but you’ll eventually run into the barrier.
- Which happens to be more crowded than on other distros as folders like
I need to run immutable distros more, and I need to figure out how to roll my own images.
Desktop side, I need certain things in the base image rather than adding more layers or using a container. Things like rsync, nvim, git, curl, lynx, etc.
Would immutable distros help reach more desktop audiences? Perhaps. It’s more about applications though. The biggest help has been electron apps and the migration to web apps. The Steam Deck is successful because it has applications people want.
Server side, they look really promising for bare metal servers. Provided, there is an easy way to compile custom images. Being able to easily rollback to a known good image is very enticing, as you point out.
I don’t work in tech but I love to tinker , have a home lab etc. I love using Linux for this, been on Linux for close to 20 years.
Got a steam deck little over a year ago, it was my first immutable
I just moved to an immutable silver blue. Been loving it so far. There’s a few things I have issues with, but it’s “just works”. I still distro hop and fuck around breaking my system for fun from time to time, hahahah. But having my main system on immutable has been great.
I’m much more comfortable trying things that I’m not sure will (or expect not to) work. I can just blast the toolbox or whatever afterwards.
Compare to some of my earlier forays into Linux, where I’d do some nonsense and then attempts to remove said nonsense would break some other load-bearing part of the OS.
I used an immutable fedora on my surface pro 4, I wanted to shoot myself in the face every time I had to install anything. I’m good on that for the rest of my natural life.
Was what you wanted not available in a flatpack/ app image?
Wasn’t about that at all. Any DNF action took a lightyear… man just typing out those long commands (very hard to remember coming from apt) nevermind the much crazier wait time. Using toolbox for dev environments to compile things was a total nightmare. I’m sure there’s a scenario where it’s ideal, that was certainly not my situation.
Gotcha I was just wondering what the limitations are, I’m still messing with and I’ve not hit one yet but I was curious where they pop up. So for devs immutable distros don’t play well, that definitely makes sense!
From what I gather, if you like tinkering and compiling and installing random weird apps then immutable can be a serious pain in the ass like I discovered.
Did you ever try using Distrobox? That’s the recommended way if installing random apps.
I’m not sure that would’ve influenced my situation with a dual core i5-6300U and 4gb ram, it’s a pretty sluggish thing from the get go. But good to know about distrobox maybe that can help me in the future. Now rocking Debian and it’s great.
Debian sounds like a great fit for you. But it’s good to know that Universal Blue has a lot of tools available for installing and tinkering that many just don’t know about. They are extremely powerful OSs.
It’s subjective. I freaking love Bazzite, it works for me. Not the other way around.
Feel like elaborating? I’ve been running it for a couple weeks and very happy so far. One nice little feature was how I can just scroll on top of the little sun icon in the taskbar and my monitors dim and brighten. But that’s prolly a Plasma thing more than anything else.
I use plasma and had no idea this was a thing. Thank you
My new measure for intuitiveness of an interface - do half-drunk, clumsy fumblings with a mouse occasionally reveal a slick new feature I wasn’t aware of?
That’s indeed a Plasma thing
I had to turn it off (which is easy in plasma) because I have two different monitors and they have different brightness, so it was either first one insanely bright to other one being normal or first being normal to second barely dim.
One thing I really like about Bazzite (compared to EndeavourOS which I ran before), is that it just works for gaming. Lots of little tweaks and stuff to get certain qol things working in EOS, are just installed and configured by default in Bazzite.
The stability is super impressive… I used to rely on TimeShift on EOS to roll back when I broke shit (which was over and over, because that’s how I learn), and while it’s trivial to rollback on Bazzite, I’ve never even been close to needing to. It’s just hard to break (and if you do, just reboot it and everything is fine).
It’s definitely more user friendly, but I wouldn’t say immutable like Bazzite is only for non-tech people.
Thanks for the info! So far I’ve been enjoying those same characteristics. I spend my work day arguing with computers, so I have little patience for doing more of it when I’m off (more seriously, I carefully marshall my tech efforts outside of work as a long-term strategy against burnout). I appreciate how “out of the box” gaming (and anything else I’ve tried) works in Bazzite, and the stability has been great too. Though to be fair, def helps that it’s my first experience with Plasma which really makes the “feeling” of the OS pop, in an unfair way lol.
Plasma is awesome! The customizability is just off the charts.
Yesterday I powered up my older laptop (running EndeavourOS) after not starting it up in several months. Had to install the updates in chunks because there were just too many, and the dependency situation was a nightmare… Anyway, got it all updated.
and then next thing I know, I look at the clock and like 3 hours passed. I had been tinkering with shit, completely unnecessarily, for hours without realizing it. I don’t think I really accomplished anything, and in fact may have left it worse off than it was before I turned it on lol.
So yeah, TONS of time saved using Bazzite, but there is that level of tinkering that I do miss at times (DistroBox can help with some things). I don’t even know if I’d say it’s something I “enjoy,” per-se… It just tickles my brain in a certain way that I don’t get elsewhere?
Immutable distros are great for applications where you want uniformity for users and protections against users who are a little too curious for their own good.
SteamOS is a perfect use case. You don’t want users easily running scripts on their Steam Decks to install god knows what and potentially wreck their systems, then come to Valve looking for a fix.
Immutable distros solve that issue. Patches and updates for the OS roll out onto effectively identical systems, and if something does break, the update will fail instead of the system. So users will still have a fully functional Steam Deck.
If you’re not very technical, or you aren’t a power user and packaged apps like Flatpaks are available for all your software, then go for it. I prefer to tinker under the hood with my computers, but I also understand and except the risk that creates.
Immutable distros are a valuable part of a larger, vibrant Linux ecosystem IMO.
Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer’s distros. It’s just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.
Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you’re being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don’t like it or it doesn’t work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.
Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I’m new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I’ve rebased three times. It’s really cool to be able to do that.
Don’t know why this would be downvoted. Atomic distro’s are a tinkerers paradise, as all of it can be done fearlessly. I can make stupid changes to configurations that I don’t understand on NixOS, then when things break, simply revert the git commit and rebuild. (Or reboot to the last build if I broke it bad enough).
Who knows. People are passionate about Linux. And downvoting takes no effort. And people downvote stuff randomly.
if something makes linux more secure, safer or easier to use then it’ll be hated because people in the linux community are allergic to all those things. Secure boot? they hate it, wayland? they hate it, immutability? they hate it, flatpaks/sandboxed app? they hate it, gnome? they hate it. Even rust is hated by many.
So Bazzite basically is an immutable 3rd-party SteamOS. It was originally designed for handhelds (though has desktop images now) and includes the Steam Deck’s
gamemodepackage. That means it has the same interface, but working on a Legion Go or an Ally X. If anyone here has* any of those three you should seriously check it out!The other thing as well is that more often than not, the update will succeed and you won’t figure out until the next boot that something is wrong. However, Bazzite has a rollback tool so you can just change back to the previous image, reboot again and get to gaming.
That’s the best reason for immutable for gaming IMO. I don’t want to be fucking around with the OS when I’m in the mood to game. Being able to quickly rollback and jump into things in ~10 minutes or less is how it should be.
Bazzite is great. I was using Nobara before it, and Solus before that and Bazzite has been the best experience I ever had on Linux, I don’t plan on changing distros as long as it remains a thing.
I remain interested in the immutables or atomic distros because I know a lot of smart people that swear by them.
I also don’t try them just yet because I know a lot of dumb people like me that end up breaking a lot of stuff before quitting them altogether.
They could be amazing and just not perfected yet or they may be a meme and no one’s proved it outright just yet. Will be lurking this thread either way lool :D
Yeah I think atomic is more appropriate but I’m not exactly sure what the difference is?
Immutable = Read-Only Root FS && Updates entire system image rather than individual files
Atomic = Updates as single transaction (all or no update) && Containerization w/ Rollback capabilityThis is quick summary from quick research pls correct where technically wrong.
That makes sense, bazzite is referred to as atomic (that’s what I meant in the above comment about atomic being more appropriate, forgot to add that context though lol) specifically instead of immutable. Bazzite updates like you said and you can always roll back, thank you for the explanation!
If we’re asking what people mean when they use those descriptors, then you’re correct.
However, literally speaking, in this context, immutable only means read-only, and atomic only means that updates are applied all-at-once or not at all (no weird in-between state if your update crashes halfway through).
The rest of the features (rollbacks, containerization, and immutable meaning full system image updates) are typically implied, but not explicitly part of the definition.
I knew a real wizard would clarify sooner than later. Much obliged and keep up the good work anon!
These distros are great for beginners or less technically savvy. They’re really just harder for people who have been using Linux forever and are very accustomed to the old ways.
The root filesystem is being read from somewhere, and if it’s being read from, it can be written to. Having an extra step or two in the way doesn’t make it “extremely secure”.
if it’s being read from, it can be written to.
Why would being able to read imply being able to write?
Having an extra step or two in the way doesn’t make it “extremely secure”.
Well it can greatly improve security by preventing a compromised app to achieve persistence.
Unless “read-only” is being enforced by hardware (reading from optical media, etc), a compromised sudo user can circumvent anything, and write anywhere. A read-only flag or the root filesystem being mounted from somehwere else are just trivial extra steps in the way.
Improved security != extremely secure, is all I’m saying. There are a lot of things that go into making a system extremely secure, and while an immutable root filesystem may be one of them, it doesn’t do the job all on its own as advertised in this post.
The whole point of Linux is to tinker, immutable distros destroy the whole point, not to mention, it’s a very windows-approach
Not to mention there’s no guarantee if security even with Immutable distros
The whole point of Linux is to tinker
Fair enough but the sole reason I went to Linux is because I despise Microsoft. I wanted a less bloated, not ad ridden, and more customized( mainly just the GUI) experience that gave me more control over my PC. Now I only use this PC for gaming and streaming, so really I just want those two things to work with as little fiddling as possible. Obviously everyone’s use case is different and immutable is definitely not a good choice for power users (from what I’ve read).
The whole point of Linux is to be a FOSS kernel/OS, that’s it.
Anything you want to (legally and morally) do with it is fine and you should not have to conform to arbitrary limitations set by others.
If you think that Linux is only for tinkering, not only are you completely wrong (since most machines running Linux are meant to be stable and not tinkered with, think servers, iot, embedded devices, etc) you are also missing the point of FOSS, since it aims to give the user freedom to do as they see fit, which includes preferring stability and security over tinkering.
There’s Linux-Libre
Not to tinker is a good thing for me at least. Some are Ok using LFS, Gentoo, etc. But distribution like Fedora Silverblue is low maintenance as i just want my task easy and an OS that just works.
To You, that’s the keyword here
I don’t think the point of Linux is to tinker. That would kinda make it for tinkerers only. In my view, the point of Linux is that its a kernel only and you can use it to build an OS around and build one which is easy to tinker with or one which isn’t. Point is, not every system is suited for every task and the Linux kernel allows you to use it how you wish (via distros or you can make your own system around it). Why the gatekeeping?
It is, it’s your machine, it’s YOURS to tinker to your needs
Or yours to not tinker and just use distros default. Right?
Umm sure, mutable ones give you the freedom
How does immitable differ in this case?
Cuz it’s immutable
When I just want it to work for my needs (i.e. using just web browser for most people) there’s no difference. Except immutable is less prone to go wrong.
So, you’re saying that immutable is terrible for system uptime.
Uptime is for services, not individual servers.
You have to reboot machines to run secure kernel code. High uptime means running outdated, vulnerable system code.
I have a really hard time getting Aurora working the way all my other Linux devices so that are running some form of Ubuntu (Mate or Bodhi). With that said, it’s been very stable and i like not being interrupted with packages to install while working on things…
Mixed bag review. I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Is there debian based immutable distro?
Yes, it’s called VanillaOS! https://vanillaos.org/
Isn’t it based on Ubuntu?
I think it was prior to version 2, but these days it’s based on Sid - https://vanillaos.org/nerd-info
Good. I just quickly glanced at the site and there were multiple mentions of Ubuntu… Glad they switched to Debian, this way I might try it on second PC.
Thank you)
