What’s the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
I see lots of people recommending immutable distros to new users as if they are able to debug the inevitable breakages that occur or difficulty installing external programs.
This goes right with recommending Mint for gaming where Wayland is experimental and everything else is behind by several versions.
I’d say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I’m using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn’t work on X11, but it hasn’t pushed me to another distro just yet…
For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I’d say that actually something “immutable” like Bazzite might be one of the best options.
Is Wayland better for gaming than X?
For basic gaming the experience should be at the very least about equal for all GPU vendors right now. If you want anything fancy beyond that, like HDR or properly paced and multi-monitor VRR then Wayland is the only way to even have a chance of it working.
I’ve certainly found so. X11 is on life support at this point.
I’ve had multiple instances where games performed better on Wayland than on x.
Yeah this I don’t understand. I do use immutable distros and quite like them(Bazzite/Aurora/Kinoite) but I would never recommend them to a new user to Linux. They just work too differently than most other distros so like 90% of the documentation you might find for other programs is pretty much useless. Like if you look up some piece of software and it says use your package manager to install, then what? It’s usually easy enough to solve if you read the distro’s docs and use their recommended approach(flatpak, brew, AppImage etc) but that’s already probably way too advanced for someone new too Linux.
NixOS is the new “I use arch btw.”
Well, it is pretty nice …
Some use an A/B system like Android. Others use more complex systems with image trees.
Package managers differ and also ways you can customize the images before/after downloading.
uBlue for example is heavily based on cloud technology and make building custom images with additional packages very easy.
BlendOS downloads packages and builds an image locally, making it easier to customize.
Others I haven’t looked at as close, but I’m sure there are plenty of differences
That’s the problem
Why do I need someone on Lemmy to tell me this when they have a whole 10 or so page website that could just as well detail this instead of the usual „Hey, your keyboard works on this distro”?
I suppose most of the website is about the difference from traditional distros rather than the difference from other immutables. Still, maybe you have a point. Go and submit a pull request to some of those websites! Write a good website inclusion in a feedback form! Join a team and help them out!
most websites are made for distributing ads, I don’t really browse much since most of it is generated by ai anyway
the real useful information can be found on forums or websites like lemmy
Ah yes the old “Join our Discord” rather than having anything beneficial being indexed
Okay, I get what an immutable distro is. I get it’s advantages in security/safety. But can someone please explain why this matters? Like, how much safer is this really? I don’t understand the cost/benefit ratio of having an immutable core, especially since compromising the core will probably require fully compromising one or more privileged processes first, at which point it would be game over for a mutable distro as well.
I think the biggest advantage for my use case is the no fuzz aspect. In the rare case something goes wrong I can reboot and select the previous version that worked without a problem. Also the ease of mind knowing I can’t really fuck up my machine, as the important parts are immutable. Other than that I enjoy having everything gaming related already configured correctly as I use bazzite - but that’s probably also true for non immutable gaming oriented distros.
Honestly, that’s the same thing I got with BTRFS+snapper. It creates a snapshot before and after any Package installation. In case anything goes wrong I can just go back to a previous snapshot. And on top of that I can easily install native packages and don’t lose any disk space to multiple partitions.
I’ve come to despise immutable operating systems since first encountering them in Android.
Precisely this is what I was about to comment, Thanks. Let me add that I’m using uBlue KDE flavor (Aurora) and don’t get me wrong, I love it… but for many reasons I’d rather not be using an immutable distro. As a personal decision. I prefer the Snapper approach, it gives you the benefit without any of the ‘costs’. But that’s how I see the ‘other differences’. To me, an experienced user and programmer, these ‘features’ are drawbacks. Immutable distros are quite good for non-power users (or whatever we may call them). Anyone without enough experience to understand the output of
env | grep PATH(to put it in some random terms). If you want to fiddle with your system, customize the shell, etc… some simple stuff that made me fall in love with Linux might be just too difficult in an immutable system… at least this was my experience as a +10 year Linux user. Just adding ZSH to the distro is somewhat difficult enough, so the distro mantainers added a ‘just recipe’ (which is just a Makefile, see uBlue ujust docs) to do the stuff you would consider normal if you had any CLI experience; so stuff like tweaking your system (e.g. in the past I’ve used arch btw) will now be alienated from usual sources like simple online documentation… But I had to try this to get to know it. So, all in all, I think these immutable distros are great for someone who just starts on Linux or programming, and forces them to keep a clean home directory, nothing crazy like conda, pip install, pipx, etc. which I’ve learn as a dev to use; and have full knowledge of what they do with my env. Forced me to use devcontainer, cool… I guess… So, that’s the “safety” that I got from an immutable system, just being forced to keeping it tidy. Not bad, specially for a rolling distro like Fedora (the base for universal blue/ aurora.)Great points, but I’m on the opposite side while being in a similar user group. I never used Arch, but I used Gentoo for a few years and did LFS a couple times. Now I’m using Aurora/Bazzite on my workstations. I hack around on my machines a lot but sometimes I just like stuff that works too. When I need to get some development done, I don’t want to run into the weird bit of configuration left over from some previous project. I like that it pushes users towards encapsulation mechanisms like flatpaks and devcontainers. It keeps the core cleaner and more stable. The tradeoffs of having to bake extra packages into a container somewhere usually aren’t too bad.
SUSE Micro uses btrfs + snapper to make read-only snapshots for it to be immutable. So, yes it’s very nearly the same.
Finally! Thank you. Makes lots of sense. I’ve fucked up at least two systems in my life by messing with drivers/settings when I didn’t know what I was doing. That would have certainly helped. I’ll have to check it bazzite. I game too through Steam/Proton and it’s not exactly a 100% match in terms of performance when compared to Windows.
I decided to go with an immutable distro for my first Linux gaming PC because immutable distros are as idiot proof as you can get. I like that I can’t really mess anything up and if something does break, I can rollback to a previous version. I’m sure there are ways to setup rollback for other distros but I’m not a Linux person so I don’t really know what I’m doing and letting Bazzite handle everything for me made it a perfect fit.
Everything has been smooth sailing with Bazzite so far.
It’s mostly useful for stability in appliances and reproducibility in large scale deployments.
IMO, I don’t think immutability makes sense for desktop use. The whole point of a desktop is to make it personalized.
You can do tons of personalization on immutable distros. It just doesn’t work the way you’re used to. I use Aurora and it’s an excellent tinkerer’s OS.
Post some screenshot bro
Of what?
Preventing supply chain attacks for one.
Nix os is on the fence tho. It is immutable, but got hot reload so…
Nix’s ‘immutability’ is, as I understand it, quite a different idea to the others.
Guix System is wildly different
I just don’t get the hype of immutable. Sure, it’s not easy to break and can be better for security, but it really does defeat the purpose of Linux freedom. It’s only really good for absolute and total beginners (meaning those who aren’t tech savvy), and for home console style PCs.
I would argue it’s the opposite of being good with beginners. Having used many distros for years, with most of my time spent in Arch and NixOS, nix basically follows zero Linux conventions and requires you to learn a new language, learn the conventions of the nix community and ecosystem (channels vs flakes, home manager, etc)
I primarily use nix but it’s specifically because I can write nix files and use them anywhere, so I’m a hobbyist, not a beginner
Mint is good for total beginners. Arch is good for those that really want to learn how Linux works. Nix is for those that want a reproducible system, not beginners
Nix is quite a different experience to the other immutable distros though.
You still have freedom. Putting “read only” on some files isn’t taking away fundamental freedom, it’s a design choice. You can still meddle with it if you go further up the chain (e.g. make your own OS fork), just like you can meddle with your normal, pre-packaged Linux kernel if you want to compile it yourself.
I think even the most power of power users could appreciate an immutable distro in the right situation: if it’s the right fit and you don’t need to tweak those details, immutability gives you some technical benefits as a trade-off.
I personally just don’t want to mess with “the core” of my PC
I like to install a lot of stuff from all around, and usually they all have these different dependencies that I might have to install separately… I use immutable because I want to know that I can purge any of that stuff easily without messing with anything else, because it’s all separated from each other.
An example on the windows side is a Tetramino stacking game called “DTET”. It’s so old that I had to install some runtime from Visual Basic 6 to run it. When I no longer need DTET, am I going to remember to remove it?
With immutable, I can just nuke whatever container I installed the program in if need be.
