What’s the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
I see lots of people recommending immutable distros to new users as if they are able to debug the inevitable breakages that occur or difficulty installing external programs.
This goes right with recommending Mint for gaming where Wayland is experimental and everything else is behind by several versions.
I’d say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I’m using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn’t work on X11, but it hasn’t pushed me to another distro just yet…
For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I’d say that actually something “immutable” like Bazzite might be one of the best options.
Is Wayland better for gaming than X?
For basic gaming the experience should be at the very least about equal for all GPU vendors right now. If you want anything fancy beyond that, like HDR or properly paced and multi-monitor VRR then Wayland is the only way to even have a chance of it working.
I’ve certainly found so. X11 is on life support at this point.
Time to use X12, boys
Yeah this I don’t understand. I do use immutable distros and quite like them(Bazzite/Aurora/Kinoite) but I would never recommend them to a new user to Linux. They just work too differently than most other distros so like 90% of the documentation you might find for other programs is pretty much useless. Like if you look up some piece of software and it says use your package manager to install, then what? It’s usually easy enough to solve if you read the distro’s docs and use their recommended approach(flatpak, brew, AppImage etc) but that’s already probably way too advanced for someone new too Linux.
I think half the reason immutable distros started being recommended to people is the fallout after LTT’s Linux challenge. I noticed some people presenting immutable distros as the solution to prevent things like accidentally removing the desktop.
NixOS is the new “I use arch btw.”
Well, it is pretty nice …
I use both, btw.
Guix System is wildly different
Okay, I get what an immutable distro is. I get it’s advantages in security/safety. But can someone please explain why this matters? Like, how much safer is this really? I don’t understand the cost/benefit ratio of having an immutable core, especially since compromising the core will probably require fully compromising one or more privileged processes first, at which point it would be game over for a mutable distro as well.
I think the biggest advantage for my use case is the no fuzz aspect. In the rare case something goes wrong I can reboot and select the previous version that worked without a problem. Also the ease of mind knowing I can’t really fuck up my machine, as the important parts are immutable. Other than that I enjoy having everything gaming related already configured correctly as I use bazzite - but that’s probably also true for non immutable gaming oriented distros.
Honestly, that’s the same thing I got with BTRFS+snapper. It creates a snapshot before and after any Package installation. In case anything goes wrong I can just go back to a previous snapshot. And on top of that I can easily install native packages and don’t lose any disk space to multiple partitions.
I’ve come to despise immutable operating systems since first encountering them in Android.
How would you fuck up your machine by installing packages? Hell, get a reasonable package manager and package installation frontend (and a reasonable brain between your ears if that’s the problem). I can’t see how anyone might get their machines into an useless or unbootable state considering that any useful package manager (even minimalist ones like aptitude or blank apt-get) will inform you what it’s going to install and unistall. If I see, that my choice is going to remove the complete DIE I am using plus X, or even GRUB, I lknow there’s something wrong with my selection and abort.
“Yes, do as I say”
A power outage during install.
Trying out experimental stuff.
Uninstalling critical packages.
Someone at $distribution fucked up packaging.
You could just as well ask why an immutable system must be immutable. The safeguards are not there for normal operation. They are supposed to help you with fatal irregularities.
☝🏻People like this fucking nerd are why Linux gets a bad name.
Nix os is on the fence tho. It is immutable, but got hot reload so…
It’s not just debatable, it’s beside the point. NixOS is declarative, trivially reproducible and natively container-ready, that’s what makes it so great.
Until you realise that you need to learn a whole programming language to run one executable outside of the package repos
I do respect nix, but it ain’t for me
If you want quick and dirty, use steam-run!
Just ‘steam-run’ that shit. (It creates a regular linux-like environment without manually setting the LD path)
I use it to run random git repos.
I’d rather have YAML than the mindfuck of a language nix uses
I love writing yaml as a nix expression. That shit locks my flake.
