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.
Hi! I've been using Fedora Kinoite (and now Bazzite Desktop) for about a year.
I'd say bazzite desktop would be a good fit for you if you want to give an immutable desktop a try. It automatically sets up an arch distrobox for steam and lutris, it even has one click installers for things like oversteer in the post-install welcome screen, it auto-updates and is generally just quite a nice improvement on based Fedora Kinoite.
Immutable distros ARE used differently, you will mostly use flatpaks for basic apps (Although a lot of people do that anyway), but any traditional packages you want to install will be done in distrobox. You CAN overlay packages to the base system, but it should be seen as a last resort.
Let me know if you have any questions :)
Interesting. Standard question, why Kinoite and why Bazzite over others? Aren’t you worried bazzite is more bloated than pure Kinoite? Or is that just my mutable distro fear lol Any resources about distrobox/layering etc you recommend?
I use Kinoite over silverblue and other Fedora versions simply because of the desktop. I choose Fedora atomic over other immutable distros because I simply think it's the easiest/most convenient. VanillaOS might be pretty good, but from what I can tell it's on an Ubuntu/Debian update schedule which isn't what I want. I tried NixOS but it's complexity just wasn't appealing.
I use Bazzite over Kinoite because it has all of the tweaks I want, honestly the amount of "bloat" isn't as crazy as you'd imagine.
I don't have any resources about distrobox unfortunately, but I'm sure they're around.
Awesome, thanks for the reply. VanillaOS is out then, I really despise anything ubuntu. I’ll try nix on my spare laptop and try Kinoite if that fails. Thanks :)
Just know, it taken me three attempts at Nix, my first 2 lasting a day to a week and my last lasting a month. It's NOT something you're going to jump into without a LOT of learning and googling. Try it as an experiment on something you do not depend upon.
Funnily enough, it seems the VanillaOS team does to since for their 2.0 release they dropped their Ubuntu base. Even if you’re not a Debian guy, I’d recommend checking them out since they’re doing really cool stuff no one else is.
Immutables are an amazing idea. I just wish Arch (EndeavourOS) had it.
Isn't SteamOS immutable and Arch based? Surely there's also a more general purpose distribution that does that.
If I didn’t enjoy tinkering, I would use one of the immutable distros, or at least the Fedora versions.
I personally don’t like that they feel like Android or Chrome OS, but I know that is also the draw to them for others.
I jumped. I replaced workstation with silverblue. It feels like installing the early version of the future of linux. From an enduser perspective you do not gain too much going from workstation to silverblue. Yet only if you were already using flatpaks a lot. Installing software into the OS becomes more difficult which is the point. It's not good for tinkering. For tinkering you should use arch. Reducing the possibilities to fuck up the system sounds great for the end user. I love that you can remove everything but from a business point of view and the responsibility I have when recommending an OS, immutability is great. Moreover it's more difficult to install snap which is good as well.
I think they have a place, but personally speaking, I feel they stifle tinkering. So they're a "no" for me.
This is why fedora had a little bar after rebooting when I updated right? What am I a Windows user?!? This is the extent of my understanding of immutable distros and I am furious with them.
No. You don't see or feel the update with silverblue. You see the update with the normal workstation version. The immutable version fixes that.
I have corrected the one thing I know about immutable distros and am now furious with all others.
Edit: Tumbleweed is not immutable, you learn something new every day, especially from your mistakes 🙃 (it's still a really nice distro)
Personally really happy with my choice of Immutable Distro: OpenSuse Tumbleweed. To me, who is half a year into using linux, its very convenient to use an immutable system as IF i were to do a wrong command or whatever its super easy to rollback the system (at least on Suse as it uses btrfs-filesystem). Another thing worth mentioning which is also why I chose to go with immutable is that it really teaches you "the good standards" of where to tinker with files and where not to, at least for a beginner like myself this is very nice.
I'm thinking about it as well! I'm on workstation. I'm not sure about the additional benefit for me as a user. Or let's say for a newbie, should I recommend the immutable version?
