I was thinking about going immutable for a long time and now I’m choosing a distro to hop to.
My question is: what are good immutable distros other than Fedora Silverblue spins, UBlue family and NixOS?
Maybe someone uses/used any? What is/was your experience with it?
I’ve been using Opensuse Aeon just over a year and it’s done great.
Tumbleweed user for the last 5 years, and dealt with a few issues over that time. The usually infrequent update break that comes with rolling release. And the Opensuse ‘Patterns’ started, which I loathe and it’s a disaster to try to disable them every install.
Aeon hasn’t had any of those issues. It’s been very much a “turn it on and get to work”.
I’ve generally had less issues with Aeon than Tumbleweed - like certain flatpaks not crashing.
But downsides as I see them:
I’m not a gnome guy. It’s fine though, I don’t hate it. But some people can’t stand it.
I had a bit of trouble running wine. Something about the default security policy. There’s a known workaround.
Kalpa needs to attract more developers to keep up with Aeon’s pace. I understand it is usable as a daily driver, but it’s not just a one to one mirror of Aeon with Plasma on top.
https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-relate/
Richard Brown is all in on Aeon along with whatever contributors are helping him. Stephen Falken appears to have no one helping him work on Kalpa unfortunately. I disagree with Richard’s stance that Kalpa shouldn’t exist, but I do wish there were some capable people able to help that project.
I don’t mind using Gnome anyway, it actually does solve some networking issues that I’ve always had with Plasma. (Dolphin not handling it well whilst Gnome Files has no issues)
I’ve heard good things about VanillaOS. Not used it myself though.
With their package manager apx, you can use software from pretty much any distro in VanillaOS (copied from link above):
Apx is a tool that allows you to generate work environments based on any Linux distribution and seamlessly integrates them with the system in a convenient way …
Does it support any DE other than Gnome? For the rest, looks cool!
Sadly, not officially (atm). I think you need to use a custom image and I don’t know how well those work.
See https://old.reddit.com/r/vanillaos/comments/1d69jn0/want_to_run_vanilla_os_but_no_gnome_de/
Here’s a resource I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for when I dive in:
Secureblue, GnomeOS (if you like updating daily), VanillaOS, AOSP, SteamOS, blendOS, and many more.
Highly recommend Guix, been using it as my daily driver for years now.
System Crafters has a really nice series on getting it setup the way you want it. I think it’s fixed a lot of stuff that is a little wonky with Nix – proper separation of config-time things and build-time things with g-exps, no putzing with bash scripts, grafting so you can reuse builds even when dependencies get updated, and just general good documentation and hackable culture with a pretty active IRC. They’ve recently added support for also managing your dotfiles the same way you do packages and system config (Guix Home). They’ve also pushed the boundaries of bootstrappability/reproducible builds so far that bitcoin-core is now building on Guix for security.
The system is pretty well thought through, and has saved me a few times where I would’ve bricked my machine on a mutable distro – now, I can just boot to a previous version of the system from the bootloader whenever my lastest changes are messed up.
