I was looking at the metrics and was thinking..wow..only 1300 Aurora users? That’s it? Worldwide? Am I reading this wrong? I mean, don’t get me wrong. Feels good to be part of such an exclusive small group, but I was expecting more users.
Are we seeing many people just choose Bazzite instead and install the developer stuff with ujust? Nothing against Bazzite of course! (I plan on deploying that as a set top box). It just occurred to me that people may be opting for Bazzite instead and installing the developer stuff instead of Aurora.
IDK, I was thinking maybe around 20K users and maybe 100K on Bazzite, but with so many Linux distributions out there, even though there are millions of Linux users (not counting Android), the numbers probably get spread pretty thin across what people use.
As you say there are many Linux distributions out there. Secondly, I think that currently immutable Linux distributions are not such popular as all the others.
Well, a lot of that has to do with the fact that immutable/atomic Linux distributions work differently than people expect. People do not like change, just look at systemd vs. init and how long that transition has taken. Ask yourself how long would it take Debian (official) to move to an immutable/atomic version, even as an option? Given how conservative they are, it would likely take years and years.
I actually posted a question on the Debian Reddit some time back asking if people would use an atomic version of Debian stable if it were available. The responses were eye-opening. Some people asked what the point would be, since Debian is already solid. A large portion responded with a firm “no” or even “never.” Others worried that even offering such a version (officially) would be bad, because they dislike the idea of immutable Linux and don’t want to see it gain any traction.
Much of this has to do that many people don’t know how immutable distributions work. Heck, I’m still trying to figure it all out. It does not help that development is currently high and there is transition/work with bootc, rpm-ostree, dnf, the layering issue, OCI images vs other types, etc. Just understanding it all, where we have been where things are going what can be done with old vs new, etc is a bit of work. So for many, immutables are a bit of a black box if you don’t have your head in the container/devops world. Many people only have very basic understanding of containers and not much of the devops pipeline stuff.
Granted, I posted my question on Reddit, and it’s by no means an accurate reflection of the broader community. Still, the range of opinions was interesting.
Personally, I think immutability is perfect for the average user who isn’t a crazy nerd. The only thing missing (and this is addressed in another thread) is some sort of notification for people like my mom: if she were using Aurora, she’d need to be alerted when a reboot is required to apply a security fix. She’s the kind of person who could easily leave her computer on for a month before rebooting.
I agree. I was just curious about the opinions of people. Linux is great in that you can run whatever distro fits your fancy. If you want to go hardcore and run Slackware…go for it! (and I did way back for a while!) or if you want Mint, that’s OK too.
You have to account for Android, it’s one of the world’s most popular Linuxes, and it’s not package based, neither is ChromeOS. There’s are reason there are zero successful mass market traditional package based distributions. They’re not suitable for end users.
Are you referring to our images or something else? Our images are neither immutable nor distributions, we need to be specific because “immutable distribution” doesn’t mean anything. You can just say “bootc images” instead.
atomic Linux distributions work differently than people expect.
How so? What are you expecting?
People do not like change, just look at systemd vs. init and how long that transition has taken.
This is a meme, systemd won long ago there is no “transition”. This is a redditism.
Given how conservative they are, it would likely take years and years.
So what? People can already make Debian base images, go nuts!
Much of this has to do that many people don’t know how immutable distributions work. Heck, I’m still trying to figure it all out.
Many people are not system administrators and do not know how to manage Linux distributions. I am curious what you’re still trying to figure out.
Wanted to address this one separately. This is advanced user territory, I’d expect most people to be just fine with a browser, and the people just “getting into Linux” to find GUI apps in bazaar and learn them.
Like figuring out GIMP or Krita, etc. That sort of thing. If a user needs to serve something a network (aka. plex, etc.) then that’s container land. We purposely put you on this path because it’s well documented and has been a proven model for over a decade.
Part of the mission is to present people with standard container deployments instead of distribution specific tooling. This is one of the reasons we don’t say “immutable distros”. Other than a few things (justfiles, a few bootc commands) the commands to run things on Bluefin system are distribution agnostic. I use systemd, flatpak, docker, brew, etc. These are all common tools.
So, I’m not really trying to be critical, just thinking about why some people may not like atomic distributions. Or trying to come up with theories as to why some people are so opposed to them. SystemD is great. I wasn’t a fan at first, but it’s hard to argue it’s success.
I’m just trying to figure out how things work underneath.
No, read only /usr has been around since like the 1980s, I grew up with read-only /usr on solaris, over the network even! No one calls Solaris immutable they just call it Solaris. And no one calls RHEL immutable, it’s just RHEL in image mode.
If above is somehow more or less correct how would you term those distributions?
They are separate things, none of those are built with bootc. We exclusively make bootable containers. We share common things, like the kernel, systemd, etc. but the read only parts of the disk aren’t something you’d classify things with.
That’s because everyone’s piling a ton of different things into “immutable” or “atomic”. Atomic is a Fedora brand name, it has nothing to do with us.
I only ever hear complaints from existing Linux users with mismanaged expectations. Our target audience never has to deal with this except when people bring up “immutable” and confuse them. There is zero reason for the user to ever need to care about this.
I had higher expectations, considering that I’ve personally converted a few friends and family members to Aurora over the past few months. To be honest, I hardly hear any mentions of Ublue on the Linux shows I follow. Perhaps it’s time for some advertising and podcast appearances?
I did not say that readonly of /usr is the only characteristic.
For me Immutable Linux means
there is some kind of the system being read-only
there are different techniques to achieve things:
bootc based: Fedora Silverblue and descendants
A/B: VanillaOS
declarative: NixOS, GUIX, blendOS
snapshot based: Garuda Linux (perhaps not fitting really well here)
Even if the term Immutable Linux is bad the common characteristic is that one can jump back to the previous instance if the new instance doesn’t work ok.
underneath.