Hey! I’m currently on Fedora Workstation and I’m getting bored. Nothing in particular. I’ve heard about immutable distros and I’m thinking about Fedora Kinoite. The idea is interesting but idk if it’s worth it. CPU and GPU are AMD. Mostly used for gaming.

  • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
    111·
    1 year ago

    I see many people here wondering, why they should consider an immutable system.
    As someone, who thought the same a few months ago, and now chose Silverblue, here are reasons why:

    • Atomic updates: never worry about half applied installations anymore. Either your OS updates successfully, or it will just work like before.
    • Less bugs and better security: every install is the same, so devs can fix one bug or exploit, recreatable on every system.
    • Automatic updates (configurable): they get downloaded by the way, without you noticing. And if you reboot anyway, you boot into your updated OS. No waiting times. The system manages itself.
    • Way harder to break
    • Changes are easily undoable: if an update breaks anything, you can just select another image and reboot, without recovering anything.
    • No junk accumulation over time, the OS is kept clean
    • Clear distinction between “your” stuff and the OS
    • You can “swap out” the base OS cleanly and keep your stuff. Want KDE? No need to reinstall, just paste one command and delete everything Gnome-related, and you are now on Kinoite.
    • Flexibility: choose between dozens of different images, like one that replicates SteamOS or Ubuntu, has the MS Surface kernel build in, offers Hyprland, and so on…

    My #1 reason is, that everything is worry free.

    Those advantages above don’t apply to “normal” OSs, even, if I keep everything in Distrobox and Flatpaks.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’m sorry but none of the above sound different from a regular distro. Maybe I haven’t got the gist. You can have snapshots and atomic updates on a regular distro, you don’t have to reinstall to switch from Gnome to KDE, I can install all kinds of stuff cleanly anyway thanks to package managers, I don’t use root often so the system files are effectively read-only as far as I’m concerned, and so on.

      As far as security is concerned I don’t see the big deal, I mean I get why a read-only OS would in theory be harder to break into but it can still be modified for updates so I guess it’s not really “immutable” after all.

      What am I missing?

      Edit: before anybody points it out, I do know about the rebase layers and I think it’s an interesting approach, but ultimately still gets the same results as packages. It may be helpful for distro builders but doesn’t make much difference as a user.

      • Sentau@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes you can do all this with regular distros but not as conveniently. Especially cleanly switching from gnome to kde and vice versa is a nightmare. And by switching I mean removing one completely(including dependencies) and installing the other.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Why a nightmare? It should be very easy on any distro with well organized packages. Remove gnome meta-package, install kde meta-package.

          • this_is_router@feddit.de
            2·
            1 year ago

            its an easy: sudo apt install task-kde-desktop; sudo apt purge task-gnome-desktop; sudo apt autopurge

            In testing or unstable this can be a problem though.

            I feel like, many people just don’t understand exactly how a distro and package managers work. immutable os feels like it allows priotizing only on on a small core part of the distribution which is immutable and slapping everything else on via flatpak or snap.

            i don’t like it and i sometimes wonder if we are not going backwards with that approach.

            • neosheo@discuss.tchncs.de
              0·
              1 year ago

              I’m not one hundred percent on the train of immutable, however, i have undertakes nixos and don’t user flatpak/snap. The nix configuration file is where i install everything.

              But while.i agree its not super hard to switch DEs on something like ubuntu etc. But one cool thing on nix (which i think you can do on any distro with nix package manager installed) is that you can test the package without installing it at all. The roll bavk id also nice cuz ive had situations where apt gets “broken” ive always been able to fix it with a little searching but its always frightening. Knowing that nix can go back to an old config at anytime makes me a little more comfortable

              • this_is_router@feddit.de
                1·
                1 year ago

                Funnily enough, I like nix. The concept is way ahead of silverblue and the likes. With nix nothing is hidden behind a compatibility layer. I feel like if we really need immutability, nix is the way to go.