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?
Let’s be honest, immutable distros repaired a well meant feature of “do whatever you want”. Yes it is possible on a regular distro doing stuff with the core files, changing or deleting them. But not everyone is prepared for the consequences. That’s where immutable hits in.
The good thing is, whatever you wanted to do with the core system, it’s anyway possible but with distrobox or ostree. But it is separated not integrated.
Only downside is, that it’s flatpak who wins the app package manager fight. Not the best one, but the best we actually have.
Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.
Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.
My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.