I know there’s always someone hating or disliking something in the Linux community or disagreeing about something since as soon as that happens something gets forked. I am just wondering why does there seem to be so much hate/dislike towards immutable/atomic distributions and Flatpaks in the Linux community ? I was one of those people and it wasn’t until I actually decided to try one out for myself that I changed my mind about about them and that my view of what I had heard of them was all wrong. Seems most of the argument is about not wanting to give up control to another party/developer about how their system is configured and that they find old package formats superior to Flatpaks?
Also, just being on Reddit.
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Yes! Reminds me of back in the day (1998?) on Slashdot they had a meme where they’d bait people into OS wars, some of my favorite early internet memories.
But these links go a long way in describing this behavior, and like Slashdot these feelings of being right and not wanting to branch out is what limits progress. Personally I love learning new things constantly, and Silverblue, and now Bluefin-dx, fits my use case better than any I’ve seen before. I know I can tweak things the way I want, but so much is just ready out of the box! Amazing job!
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Also, I just broke my own rule and read the comments, but found a spot-on example of this - in this case hate on Flatpak 
Thanks for the replies! It’s actually nice that I joined the forums here to see some more like minded people about Atomic/Immutable distributions. On Reddit and Youtube it’s mostly the same as one of you mentioned. As a long time Linux user I’ve grown to enjoy using Atomic/Immutable distributions as I have a better understanding of them now. Sometimes I think about it would be cool to run a custom kernel and to tweak around a bit, but from my own testing of different kernels I’ve never noticed a difference for myself even when gaming and two I have been less distracted with tweaking and trying out new software constantly every since I switched from Arch to an Atomic/Immutable distribution.
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I came across Silverblue via NixOS and therefore Bazzite. Before that, I used Arch.
I didn’t like flatpaks etc. at the beginning either. I had always heard bad things about it. Unsafe sources, outdated libs, etc. But with Bazzite and now with Bluefin, I put away the fear because I think what comes from Fedora can’t be so bad. And honestly, the OSes are just great. The sotware selection is great: Distrobox, brew, Sunshine, Moonlight, Steam. And above all just. Everything you need. So I’m enthusiastic.
I made my desktop the way I like it. Tiling extension etc. and the rest runs with brew and distrobox.
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I get the resistance to an extent, but there are so many benefits!
The system itself is rock solid. It’s easy to play around and experiment with various applications without semi-randomly spraying files all over your system that a traditional package manager may or may not actually clean up when/if you uninstall an application.
But I do think that the more curated experience we are all having in the Bluefin/Aurora/Bazzite world helps a lot too. I can see where someone trying the more barebones upstream versions might not be as impressed - especially if they don’t have kind folks like @j0rge and the team around to explain how things work.
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I also find a bit more security a benefit even though many people on Reddit seem to disagree about that.
Interesting topic! I can’t speak for the entire crowd, but personally my biggest problem was how slow immutable/atomic systems are in installing things. It didn’t help that I spent my early Linux experience with an Arch based OS (pacman is FAST, and in comparison rpm-ostree is… slow with reboots in the equation 
). Plus, think a lot of people jumped ship to Linux because Windows keeps making stuff slower and Windows Updates are also sloooow.
1 + 1 = 1
people who want a “fast OS” + rpm-ostree = unsatisfied users
In addition, a lot of Linux users love tinkering with the look and feel of their DEs, try out WMs, install 57 cool terminal utilities and pets, and try out new -fetch programs every 2 days. A lot of them also like the dopamine rush of updating, so they tend to update as many times as they blink within a day. I can imagine that for these users, rpm-ostree can feel like a bottleneck and make them feel claustrophobic - “what do you mean installing ONE obscure ASCII converter tool will take me 40 minutes!?” (There is obviously nothing wrong with tinkering, trying out new environments and cool tools, and making sure your system is up to date - my description is not that of mockery, but reminiscent of how I was like back in the days! 
)
Personally speaking, I also wouldn’t have gone atomic if Bluefin and UBlue didn’t exist. My laptop needs a bunch of things installed so that it doesn’t fly into space, overheat, and morph into Milky Way’s next star - and so that I can use its fingerprint sensor. My computer is… fine on its own, but I’d have to layer a bunch of hardware acceleration enablement packages anyway if I were to use vanilla Silverblue. Of course I wouldn’t be installing 20 packages an hour after completing my initial setup, but the fact that I had to spend another long period of waiting after I’d installed the OS just wasn’t very nice. Bluefin and UBlue changed that and I really appreciate and respect the entire team and everyone involved for their ideas, for their determination and effort to get this project up and running and accessible, and for constantly making improvements.
For reference, I am a very casual computer user who just happens to like to play around with computers and like to spend 72 hours overengineering stuff to save me 30 minutes per week. All I do in my computer is chat with friends, log daily events and mood in Google Sheets, play games on my browser and via Steam, watch videos in PiP using Celluloid, and window-shop in incognito mode. Oh, and work, also in browsers exclusively. 
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That’s one of my biggest annoyances too but I can live with it. It will probably improve in the future when some changes are made to Fedora.
Another thing I came across today that I took a while to figure out was my Flatpaks not following the system theme. In the end I had to give flatpak access to my ~/.icons and ~/.themes and then set an environment variable of which icon theme to use. Another minor frustration but now that I am aware of it something I’m okay with.
One reason why I switched over to an Immutable distribution is to have less distraction of trying out new software/tools and tweaking that software and making my config better. So an Immutable distribution with Gnome suits me well since I don’t change much about Gnome and I’m not distracted as much as before by wanting try out new things and tweaking things
Sometimes I do think about going back to Arch but then I think “no thanks” because I don’t care anymore about having to configre things myself about system. I only care for configuring the user stuff, so stuff I run as my user and that’s enough for me so that I’m not distracted too much and I just use my system to work and game.
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I find these comments interesting, do you find yourselves using rpm-ostree often? There’s no need to use the tool past initial setup (or if you get new hardware or some other major change to your system).
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I came from Silverblue and I’m just used to running rpm-ostree upgrade to check if there are image updates. I do run ujust upgrade every now and then which updates everything: image, brew, flatpak, etc. However when you run ujust upgrade doesn’t that just run rpm-ostree upgrade in the background to pull image updates? I only have 3 packages layered so technically I don’t even use it that often and I use it if I want to pin an image. Or are you referring to something else, another useful tool that Bluefin has that I do not know about yet?
So much hate/dislike towards immutable/atomic distributions?
I don’t really know if that’s really happening to be honest
Fedora Atomic, Bluefin, and Bazzite seem to be well received on social networks, or at least that’s what I’m feeling
NixOS has definitely exploded in popularity lately, which also kinda helps
Awesome Atomic has been trendingly gaining popularity, with a small bump since the maintenance was taken back lately
btw, if someone wanna help: Issues · Malix-Labs/awesome_atomic · GitHub
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There is also
Which is the french term for “Resistance to Change”
- Informatique : la résistance au changement est particulièrement fréquente dans ce domaine, que ce soit lors d’un changement de process, de logiciel, d’interface homme-machine… Une solution pour éviter la résistance est d’en parler aux personnes concernées avant de bouleverser les façons de faire
Translated :
IT: resistance to change is particularly common in this field, whether it is when changing processes, software, human-machine interface, etc. One solution to avoid resistance is to talk to the people concerned before changing the way things are done
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Most people on Reddit seem to dislike Atomic distributions but I guess no one can take Reddit seriously. 
And most of the Linux Youtubers I come across rather run normal Linux distributions because of not liking that it takes their freedom away of customizing of being able to customize everything about their system and the Linux Youtubers that also game on Linux like to run customized kernels which doesn’t go well with Atomic distributions unless you turn off secure boot. The latter I can understand and I also notice install possible to customize gdm-settings because that expects you can write in a certain path or it was like that the last time I tried but I’m also okay with a default looking gdm.
This runs topgrade to upgrade everything, but also calls an rpm-ostree update.
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What were you referring to when you mentioned this? The only tools I know are with Blue are: rpm-ostree, ostree and ujust. Am I missing a Bluefin tool I don’t know about yet?
The package managers are brew and flatpak, which are the day to day ones (or a distrobox if that’s your jam): Administrator's Guide
Unless you’re doing something like layering a VPN (which is done during the initial setup) there ideally is no reason for most people to use rpm-ostree, the entire point is to move away from system-level package management.
@j0rge Yeah that’s basically what I use Flatpak and Brew, I only use rpm-ostree or ujust to pull image updates. There are only 2 tools I have layered with one dependency. That being coolercontrol(and it’s dependency liquidctl) which comes from a copr repo and kitty which is not available from Homebrew. For my vpn I switched over from my vpn provider’s app to using NetworkManager because that supports Wireguard now. I even got rid of my layered icon themes and replaced them with icon themes I downloaded to my user’s homedir from gnome-look.org to get rid the icon theme packages I had layered.
In my case not anymore, but when I first gave vanilla Silverblue a try (and later when I started my atomic migration) it was something I had to keep in mind. Layers are recommended to be removed before each major upgrade to prevent potential problems, no matter how unlikely, and while I know major upgrades don’t happen every three months, it’s still something I have to keep in mind. Then after upgrading I’ll have to re-layer them. This is a minor annoyance I know, but in my perspective it doesn’t completely align with the set-and-forget purpose I have. 
Nowadays I only ever demurely install new stuff to my Arch container. My system remains clean the way atomic gods intended. I am at peace. 
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