Have traditional linux distros ever failed or bricked on you that caused you to switch to an immutable linux distro?
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Before going down the image distro route I usually used vanilla Arch Linux btw and everything was fine but when learning about the concept of everything being in a image and tools like distrobox and flatpaks I fell in love with everything about it and decided to switch and donāt think about ever going back and canāt wait for new updates and new distros to appear
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Iām a Linux nerd always on the lookout for cool new things. Ublue fit the definition, and I chose to reinstall. My Arch was getting buggy and didnāt feel stableā¦ I hopped, and learning of the rebase feature, I actually donāt plan on hopping again until I can bootc switch my way through.
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Previously Iād been running the same continuous installation of KDE neon on a laptop for 6 or 7 years, and over the past few years Iāve had more and more weird problems on it (e.g. wifi connection manager behavior, loss of KWallet integration with everything, webcam freezing after a few minutes, inability to wake up after going to sleep; none of these problems have appeared on my windows installation on the same laptop) beyond the usual hardware degradation like an increasingly bulging battery interfering with the trackpad. I got the Framework 13 as a replacement laptop, and Fedora has the best out-of-the-box compatibility and official support for it, so that was already pushing me towards Fedora as my next distro for daily use. That made Kinoite an interesting possibility for solving at least some of the configuration drift issues I had on KDE neon and (before that) Arch, especially with the increasing maturity of Flatpak and my increasing familiarity with Docker as part of what I do for work.
With this next laptop I hope to prevent the kind of configuration drift Iāve always suffered from on desktop Linux, and I want to start being more careful about managing homefiles and etcfiles and data backups so that I can reset everything regularly (usually in smaller units, like my dev dependencies for each specific project I work on, or my homefiles, but also occasionally in larger units like the entire system) without losing my changes. I think ublue provides a solid foundation for me to manage everything about my computer via GitHub, and for making the system easier to dispose of and replace with my exact configurations, but without taking me into the ātoo novel for me and too much of a non-default experience for Framework laptopsā territory that is NixOS.
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Thereās a bunch of tools that help with this but something like https://www.chezmoi.io/ can really help!
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I always hated how, in a traditional distro, every time you add a package that itself can have hundreds of dependencies (and the complexity they bring), it makes it that much more difficult/impossible to detangle.
Itās like adding applications and utilities is a one-way street ā you can never remove them without breaking the system.
Running LaTex with traditional packages gives me heartburn. Doing that in a Flatpak and being able to remove and add the whole thing with no drama was a revelation.
I like the word āatomic,ā and the atomic nature where you can blow away all the Flatpaks (and now their data files if you wish), and all the overlays, and have the same system you started with.
I want to be able to run development environments without affecting the main system, and I also want easy, reliable maintenance of all parts of the system.
Itās possible to do these same things in a traditional distro, but with an immutable, you have guardrails and reliability that didnāt exist before.
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I also donāt like how user applications like gimp being mixed with critical system components like systemd
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I wanted the security bump that comes with an atomic distro and I knew I had a workflow that could get by on one because I donāt rely on a lot of different apps. I mostly use Firefox and thatās it, so this ecosystem has a lot of upside for not so much sacrifice on my part.
Itās also nice that because Iām using an image based system that if I have a question I can get better help when troubleshooting on forums. Thereās no mystery about what I may have done to my system from who knows when that could be affecting me. Though maybe thatās a generous assumption on my part.
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I started using DevPods on windows, it was this way of working with images that just worked without borking anything up. I used to use manjaro on a desktop for personal computing but came back to it time-to-time with a borked upgrade, spent an hour fixing (using a combination of chroot / or timeshift, deleting and reinstalling things).
I came across an article or a post by j0rge that showcased that the distro utilized DevPods out of the box, and I figured if these guys make use of a tool from the get-go and their opinionated sensible default settings just appealed to me. Then there was the amazing integration of ājustā ; I just think the people working on this project are not only passing along a good set of best practices but sharing knowledge/tools that are likely ahead of their time and along the way simplifying a lot of pain points of traditional distros.
The time savings of all these approaches built goodwill really fast, and that trust has just stuck.
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