Sup penguin people.
I’ve been running various flavours and variations of Ubuntu for a while. I find I have to nuke and reset my laptop every 6ish months because things eventually stop working or I get weird bugs.
Recently I’ve been having this on and off problem where the computer just shows a black screen after turning it on. The only way to fix this is to tap keys repeatedly until a console shows up and it seems to kick the computer into gear and log in. Other times I have to restart 2-3 times before it logs me in.
I’ve had a lot of small issues like that (like having to jiggle the volume knob in the sound mixer to get sound working) and I’m wondering if switching to an immutable distro (like bazzite) would solve this apparent config creep.
I have a Steamdeck and it’s been solid and stable ever since I got it. I know it’s running an immutable distro and after researching a little bit it sounds like they can be more stable.
I’m no power user but I play some steam games and run a local 7b LLM and like to have a virtual machine or two for Windows XP emulation for some retro gaming.
Anyone have any opinions? What are your thoughts on immutable distros (like Bazzite)? Pros? Cons? Success/doom stories?
Edit: I’m back baby. 4 months later and still kicking it with Bazzite. Go immutable if you’re a former windows person and needs a computer to just work the way you’d expect without any configuration. I’m running all my steam games and plugging into my usb c dock for mouse keyboard webcam and 2 1080p monitor. I could never get that working on other distros. The future is immutable 🙌
I had an yearly experience with Nix, but I'm thinking that it is overhead for just a home PC system. You may have more pain with static linkage compared to benefits of Nix reproducability and flexibility. Now is a year I'm on the Fedora Silverblue and this one is a really good balance between complexity and usability.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "pain with static linkage"? If my links have broken in NixOS, it was always due to my inability / laziness to set things up correctly.
I have been using NixOS for my daily driver for about a year now, and while it has been a bit of a learning curve to set things up and heavily rewrite my dotfiles, the dependability and availability of packages has been nothing short of amazing. It feels a lot like the final destination for my distro hopping journey.
I use a lot of CLI tools and some system level hackage to get my keybindings just right, so when I tried out Silverblue I had to load in a lot of stuff through rpm-ostree, which was less than ideal. But if OP wants a rock solid system with Flatpak apps, I wholeheartedly second Silverblue.
I mean if you try to use anything like python packages or even try to build python from sources it is painful. The only way to create developer environment is to use something like
nex developshells and you need to care about passing to LD_LIBRARY_PATH all that you need. And nothing downloaded as a binary is not working... For example, if I'm working on a Java-maven project that includes maven-protobuf then it is not working for you because protoc binary formanylinuxis made for a dynamic linkage... Overall developer experience is painful. And anything that is not in nixpkgs you cannot just download, build from source and use: you need to pack everything into packages with resolving all the dependencies by hands...Thanks for clarifying! I can totally see where that sort of stuff can really mess things up.
My experience with development environments has been a bit better: Node works out of the box, no problem. For Ruby, the workflow took a little setting up (with bundix), but ended up working very reliably. For R, I actually enjoy that I can set up all my packages with home-manager and they get updated in my regular update cycle and it's not a separate process altogether.