In my opinion: Yay for people not tech savy, so they can’t bork their system, and it prevent most malware to do damages. Or for special devices, like the Steam Deck!

Nay for thinkerer like me, if I want to uninstall the boot loader, I need the option!!

I really wanted to try an arch-based immutable OS. I came across what is now known as “ashos”. It was (and still is) in early development. It relies on btrfs snapshots for its anti-hysteresis properties. The code is mostly Python, but it just uses os.system calls everywhere and often doesn’t do anything to verify exit codes before continuing to the next command. The main developer doesn’t seem very interested in following best-practice conventions of the language he’s working in, so that’s where my interest unfortunately ended.

I follow Jorge Castro on fedi, and I see a lot of the points he makes in promoting not only ublue but also immutable distros and related containerization tech in general. To me, it seems like a lot of added complexity and excitement to work around distro-specific problems that I do not have.

Would it be cool to be able to instantaneously re-deploy my machine’s entire environment? Sure, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve borked an Arch install in the thirteen years I’ve been using it: That number is zero.

Been using Silverblue for about a year now with no issues, recently rebased to ublue Nvidia for extra stability and some other perks. For my use case (web browsing, document viewing and editing, coding) it’s been perfect. My coding environment lives in an arch linux container, all my other apps are flathub flatpaks

I’m keeping a close eye on the various immutable distros. I’ve tried NixOS a couple of times now, but I ran into issues with software compatibility. My development tools would constantly have issues, which if I put in a ton of work I could generally workaround… Then there was some software that I just couldn’t run, and you can’t just run a standard “Linux” binary because all of the libraries that most binaries would expect, such as libc, libssl, etc are not in /usr/lib, but rather they are in the Nix store so those binaries need to be patched to search for their required libraries in the correct place.

The final nail in the coffin for my last go around at NixOS was I need to use a specific piece of software that does time keeping for work, and it operated fine until one day it signed me out and the button to sign back in did nothing. Even when I started the program from the CLI, there were no errors. If I can’t sign in, I’m effectively not “on the clock” so that is an absolute show-stopper for me. I replaced NixOS with Fedora, and it worked perfectly fine after that. It is a shame because I quite enjoyed the idea of having a reproducible system that allowed me to blow away the system, then reinstall it, point it to a flake I built, and run a command resulting in everything being back the way it was.

I’ve been wanting to give VanillaOS and Silverblue/uBlue a try, but to my knowledge neither of them support a dual-boot setup, and I run Windows alongside Linux for the occasional game that doesn’t work in Linux (as well as a backup environment to be able to access my tools for work, such as the scenario I mentioned earlier). I’ve heard that you can somewhat get around this by having separate drives and while my Windows install is technically on a different drive, the drive that I use for Linux also has a partition for games in Windows, as that boot drive is only a 240GB drive and I believe both of those distros require that you dedicate the whole drive to it.

I dunno, not being able to turn off the sound is a deal breaker for me.

/s

I’ve been using the same Silverblue installation for about two years (maybe even more than that). Initially, I did a lot of tweaking because I didn’t really know how to approach toolbox and flatpaks, especially because I don’t use Gnome as my desktop environment, so this system went from standard Silverblue to Silverblue+i3 overlayed, then to Silverblue+sway overlayed, recently it got rebased to Sericea and it’s still running like day one. It also got upgraded from version 35(-ish) to 38 still without any issues (well, I did have some issues, but I simply rolled back and that fixed it).

I’m also deploying several Fedora CoreOS servers with a similar level of success, but those mainly tend to just run some containers, so I would say I mess way less with those, it’s been mostly just update/upgrade to the latest, check if podman is still running my containers and let them be.

The only immutable “distro” I use is SteamOS on the Steam deck, and already knowing that I will have to re-install networkmanager-openvpn annoys me.

I’ve been using uBlue (https://ublue.it/)for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been loving it.

Most software exists as a flatpak, and if not, I can just run a distrobox for it. Can’t complain.

I’ve been running Silverblue for 2 years. Apart from the hiccups mostly at the beginning of that time, things have been running very smooth and I haven’t had any issues worth mentioning. Things that have been and still are hassles are e.g. missing media codecs (ffmpeg and friends) and kernel configs & modules (e.g. drivers such as nvidia). I had to learn a few new tricks with flatpak but my major use case - Steam - runs as flawless as it does on other platforms.

I’ve been daily driving openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa for the better part of two years now. I don’t see any good reason to return to a traditional distribution for a desktop machine. I very much know what I’m doing as a linux user/admin, having been using it for years, and the no-fuss/no-hassle nature of an immutable system is exactly what I want for my workstations. And ultimately my servers.

I have very little familiarity with most immutable distros and I don’t know how difficult they are to make necessary configurations to system files. If I can’t change things that need to be changed, that’s an issue for me.

That said, I’ve just started looking at NixOS, which is immutable from my understanding. It looks incredible, because you preconfigure everything exactly how you like in a config file then build the system from that config. It seems like the best of all worlds - total control over your system to configure it how you want, multiple easy fallbacks if you mess something up, no worries about forgetting what changes you’ve made or how to replicate/undo them, and the security and unbreakability of an immutable filesystem. For the first time since I started daily driving Linux, I think I’m going to distro hop.

For personal desktop use I won’t recommend.