this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can't mess with the root without extra steps.

For anyone who isn't familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don't want to describe it because I am still learning.

My question is: what does the community think of it?

Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?

Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?

Any other input would be appreciated!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Has anyone had good success with setting up a development environment in an immutable distro? I love the entire concept because it fits with a lot of my other software preferences, but the tools for containerized dev environments felt frustrating.

Like, what do you do for your editor? vscode + devcontainers feel like the best option, but it's rough when I need other IDEs (like I use some of the Jetbrains products). Stuff like toolbox works well too, but to get an editor in that, you have to install it in each one, or make a container that has it built in.

Otherwise, I'll stick with plain Fedora — I use flatpaks for all of my apps anyways (except my editor)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I use Jetbrains, devcontainers, and distrobox on Bluefin-DX and it has been flawless out of the box. There's a single command to install the Jetbrains toolbox, which let's you then manage all their apps.

Couldn't recommend it enough, made my development lifecycle so easy.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I do my main development with Bazzite. I use the Neovim flatpak for my editor and toolbox for builds and such.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Running cli apps like neo vim from a flatpak is frustrating... "flatpak run com.something.neovim" is just the worst way to handle things. Complete deal breaker.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

i started learning rust with nixos, you can declare a shell.nix with everything needed for the environment, and those things will only be available in that folder.

there are caveats and annoyances to this like building a python environment costed me some time, because python packages sometimes require compling and all the shared libraries in nix are not in the right path (because you can have multiple versions installed) so you need to set some env vars to patch this.

nothing that gpt cannot solve.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

From an advertising perspective, it's important to think about who you're targeting. Who are your likely customers? Certainly there are some based on the strengths that you raised.

However, some people are definitely not a good target audience, and some people is actually a very large group of people. There are a lot of current and potential users who essentially want the standard major applications to work, and they're not going to touch the root partition, and they want things to be very simple. For people like that, Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora already do what they want. And these major operating systems have been around for so long that people will naturally be more confident using them, because they were their friends have experience, or because they think the organization has more stability because of its experience.

Of course a lot of things depend on how you define words, but to me the above paragraph describes the mainstream audience, and I don't think you're going to have much luck reaching them, because I don't think the thing you're trying to sell gives them extra value. In other words, it's not solving a problem for them, so why should they care.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Could you share some pics (without anything private ofc) of bazzite? I wanted to try it but I couldn't use it as live distro. My main problem is arch because I'm used to apt and I find pacman or whatever it uses difficult for me (nothing I can't learn ofc)

I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update

What do you mean? Thanks

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Isn't bazzite fedora-based? Meaning you use dnf instead of apt or pacman.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't know what it uses and as someone who always used apt, pacman or dnf is hard to understand

Edit: Not that I can't learn.. Just saying is hard for me

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