Consider deleting this one if you will ;) .

I think you’re right. Thank you!

deleted by creator

We’d rather like to see that anyways 😜.

OP, it seems as if the fear mongering and misinformation may have reached you through your cautious disposition.

I’ve gone through every single comment found below your post and at times I’ve been dumbfounded and/or astonished by the ludicrous claims that are spouted.

FFS, someone even expressed a problem found on imperative systems… While Fedora Atomic can be made (relatively) declarative (i.e. the exact opposite of imperative) for over a year now.

I will leave you with two videos in which the recent conference talks by the very same people that work on Fedora Atomic can be found. Consider watching these if you’re interested to know what they’re actually currently working on. If you pay attention, you will even notice how they mention common misconceptions that have also been brought up here…

First watch this one. Then, watch this.

The only fair criticism that I’ve found is the required investment and effort to adjust due to the associated paradigm shift and learning curve. However, this is peanuts compared to Guix System or NixOS.

Even if that’s the case, it’s telling of Linux’ maturity.

is lead by a single person

Ultimately, (some) decisions are made by a single person. However, the list of maintainers suggests that contributions are welcome.

> even though there is no evidence that Chromium is not even less secure)

The double negation makes it hard to understand; but if I would give it a try, then I would get the following:

“even though there is evidence that Chromium is even less secure)”

If the above represents your views, could you provide said evidence?

even though there is no evidence that Chromium is not even less secure

What’s your take on Madaidan’s (i.e. security researcher on projects like Kicksecure and Whonix) article on the matter? I’m aware that it’s a bit outdated. However, would you be able to confidently claim that nothing found within is relevant today?

Maybe I’m already running in XWayland somehow?

That’s definitely possible. Within Firefox, what does about:support reveal on this matter?

FWIW, I just noticed this thread

But to your earlier one, I can get the VPN client working outside of a container. There’s even an RPM file from the vendor, so installing it is just as easy as installing any other package.

Aight. You know what you ought to do then 😉.

I appreciate the input!

It has been my pleasure!

We’re appreciative of your considerations and reservations. However, some of your views seem unnuanced at best or plain biased at worst.

The problem is all the apps and things you may wish to do with your OS.

I’m aware that the rest of the comment goes over this. But, I hope the mention of “all” here is merely an oversight.

Flatpak is the preferred method of installing apps as it doesn’t interfere with the OS, but that is a compromise that means more overhead for running apps including memory and disk space

While that’s technically true, a (relatively) modern device wouldn’t even care. I don’t recall OP mention their hardware specifications; but if they’re perfectly capable of running VMs, then I don’t see why they would be bothered by this (almost) unnoticeable amount of overhead.

its a work in progress

Sure…, but we’re not talking about alpha, beta or even RC software. Like, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you make it sound as if it’s very new and/or immature. Fedora Atomic has been in the works for over 10 years. It first released their Fedora Atomic Host (currently known as Fedora CoreOS) in 2014 and later released Fedora Atomic Workstation (currently known as Fedora Silverblue) in 2018. Heck, Fedora has already put so much trust in their Atomic branch that they intend for 2028 that immutable variants are the majority of Fedora Linux in use.

By contrast, what is it that you base this statement of? That it receives very active development that most other distros would be jealous of? That it rapidly implements all kinds of new features that you’re having difficulty keeping track of?

and with significant compromises at the moment.

This is a big claim. But I haven’t seen enough in your comment to substantiate this. Your two best claims are:

• Flatpak is the preferred method of installing apps as it doesn’t interfere with the OS, but that is a compromise that means more overhead for running apps including memory and disk space, and less integration with the host OS than traditional apps.

Which is a problem of Flatpak on all platforms. The very same Flatpak that was recommended by people associated with Steam/Valve for Ubuntu. Furthermore, if OP creates their own image, then this isn’t even an issue; they can practically bake whatever they want into their image. There are also multiple tools to get this going. I achieved it in a weekend (as a noob) last year, so it ain’t hard. Finally, ‘over-reliance’ on Flatpak is not even a thing on Guix System and NixOS.

• You can overlay native apps but the more you overlay onto the immutable os, the more complex upgrading gets and the risks of breaking stuff.

This is not an issue with your own image. If the image itself is busted, then it doesn’t come out of the pipeline. Hence, the busted image would not have been delivered to your device in the first place. And, again, layering isn’t a thing on Guix System and NixOS. Hence, this problem doesn’t exist for them.

Your VPN may just be the first of many programmes you find you need to overlay.

Do you (for some reason) imply that layering is necessarily a bad thing?

If your needs a re very simple then maybe it’ll be easy, but if you’re using lots of software and tools (particularly if its not available Flatpak) or custom OS config you may find atomic desktops are not yet quite ready for you.

I have yet to receive substantive evidence from you to support this view of yours. I hope you’ll deliver…

It could be frustrating and off putting if you try linux immutable, find loads of problems and attribute that to linux when its actually the immutable OS that’s the cause.

I could change the word “immutable” in the above sentence to “traditional” and it would have been an equally nonsensical statement.

But I’m fully aware that my frustrations are atomic problems

Are these frustrations solved by layering with rpm-ostree? If so, just go with it. I’ve always layered over a dozen or so packages and it has worked out fine; it’s defaulted to automatic upgrades in the background, so you don’t feel much of it anyways.

I just recently learned that openSUSE users also have a lot of stability due to btrfs snapshots, so maybe that’s really the feature I’m looking for. I don’t know much about it, honestly.

I love openSUSE and what they do with Btrfs snapshots and Snapper.

However, in terms of ‘robustness’ and ‘stability’, I don’t think anything currently out there can hold up to Fedora Atomic, Guix System and NixOS. This is just by design; the leap from traditional to atomic, then reproducible and finally declarative ensures that issues related to hidden/unknown state, accumulation of cruft, bitrot, configuration drift are left behind in the past. If Btrfs snapshots + Snapper would have been sufficient, then openSUSE themselves would never have desired the creation of openSUSE MicroOS (i.e. their attempt at an ‘immutable’ distro) in the first place.

That’s the most wholesome reply I’ve had in some time. Thank you for making my day! I appreciate it 😊!

Unfortunately, I don’t own any device with Nvidia. Hence, I don’t think I’ll be able to help out. However, wayblue’s maintainers are pretty active. Therefore, consider opening an issue on its GitHub page and perhaps they’ll be able to help out.

I apologize for not being of much help here. Wish ya good luck, though!

Happy cake day btw!

Glad to be of help!

And thank you for reporting back!

Enjoy 😊!

It has been my pleasure!

It used to be called Sericea. However, the obscure names started to become very unwieldy. Therefore, they chose to preserve the naming for earlier established and recognized names (i.e. Silverblue and Kinoite) while Sericea became Sway Atomic instead.

If I understand it correctly, layering an application is no more dangerous than a regular install on a non atomic os.

True~ish.

There’s an important caveat though; for whatever reason, rpm-ostree can outright fail to upgrade (due to conflicts related to layered packages) while an issue like that is more rare on traditional Fedora and dnf. Thankfully, I’ve never had a problem that I couldn’t solve with rpm-ostree reset run on a (previously) pinned deployment (through sudo ostree admin pin <insert number>). However, when used irresponsibly, this (i.e. layering) can outright destroy your otherwise very robust ‘immutable’ distro.

It’s easier to teach people to be cautious than to teach how they should act accordingly. Hence, uBlue’s documentation tends to be more conservative in order to protect (especially newer) users from shooting themselves in the foot.

It’s found here. It’s called sericea-nvidia. For this image, please refer to the installation guide found here if you’re interested.

Thank you for your reply!

Thank you, this helps even further.

It has been my pleasure 😊!

I scratched the surface of immutable and this further dissects it into deeper “categories”.

Yup. For your information, ‘immutable’ distros have only gained popularity relatively recently. In fact, for a long time, it was pretty obscure.

In 2003 we had the initial release of our first ‘immutable’ distro; NixOS. Then, inspired by it, Guix System was released in 2012. After which, within a couple of years, the distros with connections to enterprise Linux got their first ‘immutable’ distros:

• Fedora in 2014 with Fedora Atomic Host (later CoreOS)
• Ubuntu in 2016 with Ubuntu Core
• openSUSE in 2017 with openSUSE MicroOS

However, these three were primarily meant for server and/or IoT. Then, in 2018, Fedora released Fedora Atomic Workstation (which later changed its name to Fedora Silverblue). I’d argue we owe the current renaissance of ‘immutable’ distros to it. And then, inspired by Fedora Silverblue, we’ve had the release of dozens of 'immutable’ distros in the last 2/3 years (including openSUSE MicroOS Desktop (later openSUSE Aeon) in 2021). Ubuntu has yet to release their Ubuntu Core Desktop. Though, it’s in active development.

However, even if we’d limit ourselves to the earlier mentioned ‘immutable’ distros (i.e. Fedora Atomic, Guix System, NixOS, openSUSE MicroOS and Ubuntu Core), we find that they’re very different to one another. Heck, by comparison, e.g. Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu aren’t actually that different to each other.

Though, perhaps curiously, we find that at least 80% of the user base of ‘immutable’ distros are using either Fedora Atomic (and/)or NixOS.

My first thought is that, if I didn’t know about immutable distros in the first place (aside from the meaning of the term), I probably wouldn’t know what I’m missing or gaining.

Exactly.

My uses for Linux will grow across 3 categories.

1. Business and office work. Mainly spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and virtual meetings

2. 3D Design, 3D Printing, bitmap and vector graphics editing, coding, and retro video game development

3. Streaming via OBS, ATEM, webcam, HDMI capture, and various USB inputs and devices.

As far as I can tell, none of these should necessarily bring up problems or troubles on ‘immutable’ distros.

To give an example of something that’s not or less supported on ‘immutable’ distros: Unified Kernel Image with Secure Boot.

AFAIK, openSUSE Aeon can do it currently. But IIRC, there’s no documentation. NixOS can actually do it as well and there’s plenty of documentation on it. Fedora Atomic can’t yet, but there’s active development surrounding it. However, I don’t expect this feature on the smaller ‘immutable’ distros. Hence, for them, I’d regard this as absolutely impossible.

I have tried building machines on non-tablets and have got 80% of the way there with all 3. The tablet has me 100% with 1 & 2.

I’m glad to hear that!

This all gives me a greater understanding that helps me avoid and research more into the options based on needs.

Great! FWIW, if there’s anything to take from this interaction, then it’s definitely this.

Consider reporting back on how it goes 😉.