1y ago

Experiences using immutable Linux desktops?

I am playing around with Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon and I really like the painless updates.

Still, my daily driver for some years now is Debian, and I have a decent setup via Ansible - everything just works for me.

My question is mostly to long term Linux users, which use Linux in a professional context and jumped from a distribution like Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE or Debian to NixOS, Silverblue, Aeon etc.

What is your experience? How did your workflows change on your immutable Linux distribution? Did you try immutable and went back to a more traditional distribution - why? How long are you running the immutable distribution and what issues and perks did you run into?

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42 comments

Silverblue works fine for me but I miss gparted
- What's the problem with it? (legit question from non-silverblue user)
  
  there's no flatpak
  
  Knowing such basic tools are missing makes me quite averse to trying it :/
  
  You can still install most packages, it's just more steps. Look up "silverblue rpm-ostree overlaying"
  
  It feels a bit like a phone OS, which is kinda awesome and horrible at the same time. It has gnome disks (or whatever is called, the default gnome partitioner) as an ok alternative to gparted. I have it installed on an old laptop that i occasionally use for web browsing and other light tasks, and for that it's great. I wouldn't use it for anything serious, but it's great if you want just a basic, no maintenance OS.
  
  Of course you can install gparted, you can run just about anything that you want, it's still Linux.
  
  I know but it kinda feels wrong haha. I like to use it flatpak only.
- you can always just overlay that ;)

42 comments