I believe part of the objective of this project is to make immutable distros usable so I’m going to give some feedback on the pains that a first time user must suffer. Also I may just throw a couple of questions there.
Making the installation work was a PITA. At half of the installation there would be cryptic messages complaining that the installation could not be completed because some ostree command failed with code 1. First I found that this may be caused by my efi partition having old entries, which I removed from Windows. The installation progressed more after this but failed with a similar (but not the same) error. After a lot of trying and many attempted installations, I found out that immutable distros are very picky with partitioning, so I allowed it to make automatic partitioning, using btrfs with all its preferred subvolumes (I don’t know how this works) and creating a new efi partition, which worked (yay!) but I saw on the internet which is against the standard having 2 efi partitions.
On startup, grub did not find the windows installation, and I have to say, boot is surprisingly slow (it feels like I’m on spinning HDDs again), but thankfully a simple grub command brought Windows to grub (cannot paste the exact command as it seems like history on the terminal is a bit wonky).
I’m using the nvidia version of Aurora, so I would expect the video card to work half decently out of the box. After the installation I connected the laptop through HDMI to the tv, but the video and audio sound were crappy. I have to say I’ve suffered from this before, and this is for sure my last laptop using an nvidia card. I think what happens is a combination of the laptop deciding it is going to use the intel card, and the intel card rendering video like crap (I don’t know how it can do it so poorly on 2024), This also took some time and bricking my desktop (thankfully Aurora has Ctrl+Alt+ to switch to tty on login screen!). I was able to force the nvidia card setting this on bash_profile:
export __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia
export __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1
There were a couple more issues I’ve found, but I think these are common to all distros with flatpak:
- Flatpak Firefox render very poorly addon fonts, which I haven’t been able to solve (anyone has a clue about this?).
- Firefox is very confused to where its profile is, which is solved by giving it permissions on the home directory with flatseal.
- Avidemux freezes the OS when loading a video if on preferences - display tab, video is not configured with the Qt backend.
Now I’m trying to get Terminator working as my terminal, or at least see if I can have the same feature of mosaic of terminals which is a killer feature for me, but to no avail. I’m trying to avoid layering at all costs.
This has been my experience until now. There were another minor things, but quick to fix, and I think they are not relevant to give feedback. Cheers!