Linux

The ublue releases (bazzite/bluefin/aurora) are tweaked to be set up and ready to go with minimal or no set up. You can switch between ublue and the normal fedora atomic distros, or even user customized variants, from what I understand. The root system will change, but anything installed under your user account will stay the same. The only problem that might occur between switching is that different desktop environments might overwrite some settings and cause problems that way. You would want a way to backup your config files just in case if you do a lot of switching.

This also means you can't install multiple desktop environments side by side. Like if you wanted to choose between kde,gnome,xfce at the log in screen, it's not possible under the atmoic distros. When i've done that on regular distros it would always result in a mess, and getting rid of a DE meant a lot of orphaned programs I didn't want, so I avoid doing that, but this is a potential downside to the atomic distros. You would have to rebase and redownload stuff every time you switch DE.

Otherwise they are rock solid and basically designed to get you up and running as fast as possible, and be as stable as possible with seamless background updates. I'm running bluefin, and it's the most user friendly and smooth experience on linux i've ever had.

Flatpaks are better for security though. Containerization is a necessity for any serious device connecting to the internet.

Linux users got way too confortable giving any obscure package they found on AUR root access to their entire device, lol.

My biggest disadvantage of atomic distros is flatpak reliance too. I hate how bad the terminal interface for managing/running flatpaks is. But I still hope that this will improve in the future.

I agree. Fundamentally, you still need good distros to plug into distrobox to make swapping between immutable systems quicker. In general I feel like running Fedora Atomic has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of using distrobox + boxbuddy to get quick and easy installs from AUR or something and saving annoying-to-make configs in a backup file somewhere.

Atomic is also absolutely fantastic for throwing on an old computer that you use rarely. The update will not break after letting it sit for so long without them.

What about NixOS? It seems to be doing something very different from most distros. I used it briefly and it was a refreshing experience to just update the config file to add and remove programs, I know that a lot of people share their configs and it makes it easy to keep programs consistent from different installs. I would have installed it on this laptop if the installer wasn't giving me so many issues, so I ended up with MXLinux instead, but I still look on my NixOS days fondly.

I think this approach is going to fair the best for mainstream adoption (i.e. Windows refugees). So I would agree that the "future" is going to involve immutable distros as a large, possibly majority, of all Linux installations.

Honestly, I haven't considered this before but it sounds like a great idea.

An image-based system would be the bare minimum to achieve basic security, but there would still be so many security issues compared to Android and iOS, that I don’t think Linux phones are worth putting time and development effort into.

AOSP is a fantastic base for open source mobile systems. The FOSS mobile development community should rather shift its focus to AOSP, develop a good understanding of it and get familiar with the code, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with mobile Linux distros.

This is the least of the issues that Linux phones are facing though. It's mostly the drivers that are lacking. Linux phones are also one of the areas where you actually don't want flatpak and docker bloating up your system with duplicated dependencies because you have limited storage.

Same here. I have and will always periodically reinstall no matter which OS I happen to be using. Arch is the only distro that keeps me coming back because installation and setup is such an active process. Every time around I learn something new and get more effecient at the process, which is so much more rewarding than filling a few boxes and waiting on a progress bar as is the case with most distros I have experienced.

eh, it's not all root, essentially just the binaries. /etc and /var are RW

Oooh, didn't know about that. Very exciting

Care to elaborate on 'the risks of flatpak'. If you are refering to the practice of people using unofficial flatpaks: Yes I think that poses a certain risk because you are adding an additional party to your threat model.

I was gonna comment this, decided not to, then decided the info should be part of this thread either for OP or future readers, so here goes:

Enterprise Linux distributions are unbeatable for their purpose. To your point, I've never in my entire career had even the smallest issue maintaining one, they're wonderful. They achieve this, though, by being a stable, truly versioned release that will never see anything beyond minor upgrades. The reason why nobody recommends server distros for gaming is because of hardware compatibility and library support, and you end up maintaining more of your own junk anyway. Got the latest gpu? Great, compile your drivers.

Enterprise Linux distros are awesome and the most painless Linux experience imaginable, as well as a great workstation experience too BUT they typically are among the worst options for gaming if you want a simple system.

You might want to look at the ujust commands on Bazzite, they have some options for setting up surround sound and VR I'm quite sure. I have a pretty simple setup personally so I've never used those things.

It uses more, yeah. But it's not a lot more. You could maybe compare the iso sizes