I’ve resisted immutable distros if only because I felt it wasn’t “how linux should be.” That’s probably not even my view because I’ve only used Linux for 3 years, so I’m not some greybeard. I think its been an attitude in online Linux circles that I read and kind of got morphed into.
Today I decided to try KDE Linux. Its still in alpha, so I’m sure I’ll find rough edges, but so far I can do everything I would do on my previous Arch system.
I know with snapper/timeshift you can have the same sort of stability as if you were running an immutable, but it always stresses me out to have a system that can crash. This is all in my head as well because I never had an update mess up my Arch install.
Besides relying on flathub a bunch, everything seems the same, except its an atomic desktop. I’m guessing I’ll struggle with some CLI programs, but I can probably use brew for those. I’m also by no means a power user. I’m a regular user. Use the web, watch videos, music, some games. So I don’t know why I thought I needed access to my core system at all times, even when I never used it.
Anyone else dipping into immutable now that they’ve been around a while? Anyone trying the KDE linux distro?
the whole immutable distro idea is just ludicrous to me, in order to upgrade the software, i.e. the new image that got downloaded, I hafta reboot - what the fuck, is this windows 98? I reboot like never, close my laptop or suspend my desktop in the evening and resume in the morning with all my shit how I left it.
it feels like going the wrong way, wasn’t there some progress on hotswapping kernels after upgrade or sumsuch? that was what I thought we were going towards, this feels so awkward and bad on so many levels, nevermind the bloat of getting a whole new OS image because five packages changed… and the cruft and fluff of layering packages and adjacent voodoo, dios mio. basically, everything is way shittier because someone might fuck with /usr/bin or wherever…?
apple did this years ago, with little to no friction. but those fucks update the OS coupla times a year, so dealing with this once a quarter ain’t that big of a deal. apple also ships a stellar backup solution with the system that restores the system perfectly, system and user files, whereas no such thing exists over here.
If you install an app via the built in package manager, yep, you’ll have to restart to update the system image, but for most apps you’ll need (and don’t require deep system integration), you could just use appimage, flatpak or snap, which will all work without a restart. I’ve actually been using immutable distros for many times I’ve used Linux, and once you use it, it’s easy to get used to it unless your use case would work better on standard Linux.
Also, I don’t follow much if the kernel hotswapping feature news, but I do know that for these immutable distros, a pretty great feature is that you can just rebase the entire distro via a single command if you’d like, and you’ll keep all user data. I’ve actually done it on one of my spare laptops, rebasing from fedora kionite to bazzite linux, and it wasn’t awfully fast, it took an hour or so, but I find it impressive nonetheless.
That’s really neat. Maybe a new breed of distrohopper will be born.