I’ve seen a lot of talks on the benefits of immutable distros (specifically Fedora Silverblue) but it always seemed to me as more of a hassle. Has anyone here been daily driving an immutable distro? Would you say it’s worth the effort of getting into?
In my opinion: Yay for people not tech savy, so they can’t bork their system, and it prevent most malware to do damages. Or for special devices, like the Steam Deck!
Nay for thinkerer like me, if I want to uninstall the boot loader, I need the option!!
Yeah that’s my feeling on it too. I think an immutable OS would be great for something like an office, where you can have everyone on the exact same setup that’s way harder for non-techie people to break, and presumably if something does go wrong then the fix will work for everyone.
But yeah I’m too much of a tinkerer to use one on my personal machine.
The only immutable “distro” I use is SteamOS on the Steam deck, and already knowing that I will have to re-install networkmanager-openvpn annoys me.
I put together an Ansible playbook to “recover” from SteamOS updates. I use mine for gaming and some software development, and trying to get back Arch packages would be a huge pain without my playbook.
Isn’t ChromeOS immutable? I see the hype for inbeded devices maybe servers. Other then that it seems like it’s not worth the hassle.
I have very little familiarity with most immutable distros and I don’t know how difficult they are to make necessary configurations to system files. If I can’t change things that need to be changed, that’s an issue for me.
That said, I’ve just started looking at NixOS, which is immutable from my understanding. It looks incredible, because you preconfigure everything exactly how you like in a config file then build the system from that config. It seems like the best of all worlds - total control over your system to configure it how you want, multiple easy fallbacks if you mess something up, no worries about forgetting what changes you’ve made or how to replicate/undo them, and the security and unbreakability of an immutable filesystem. For the first time since I started daily driving Linux, I think I’m going to distro hop.
