What's the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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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.
Itβs mostly useful for stability in appliances and reproducibility in large scale deployments.
IMO, I donβt think immutability makes sense for desktop use. The whole point of a desktop is to make it personalized.
You can do tons of personalization on immutable distros. It just doesn't work the way you're used to. I use Aurora and it's an excellent tinkerer's OS.
@chunkystyles @renegadespork
Post some screenshot bro
Of what?
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.
Precisely this is what I was about to comment, Thanks. Let me add that I'm using uBlue KDE flavor (Aurora) and don't get me wrong, I love it... but for many reasons I'd rather not be using an immutable distro. As a personal decision. I prefer the Snapper approach, it gives you the benefit without any of the 'costs'. But that's how I see the 'other differences'. To me, an experienced user and programmer, these 'features' are drawbacks. Immutable distros are quite good for non-power users (or whatever we may call them). Anyone without enough experience to understand the output of
env | grep PATH(to put it in some random terms). If you want to fiddle with your system, customize the shell, etc... some simple stuff that made me fall in love with Linux might be just too difficult in an immutable system... at least this was my experience as a +10 year Linux user. Just adding ZSH to the distro is somewhat difficult enough, so the distro mantainers added a 'just recipe' (which is just a Makefile, see uBlue ujust docs) to do the stuff you would consider normal if you had any CLI experience; so stuff like tweaking your system (e.g. in the past I've used arch btw) will now be alienated from usual sources like simple online documentation... But I had to try this to get to know it. So, all in all, I think these immutable distros are great for someone who just starts on Linux or programming, and forces them to keep a clean home directory, nothing crazy like conda, pip install, pipx, etc. which I've learn as a dev to use; and have full knowledge of what they do with my env. Forced me to use devcontainer, cool... I guess... So, that's the "safety" that I got from an immutable system, just being forced to keeping it tidy. Not bad, specially for a rolling distro like Fedora (the base for universal blue/ aurora.)Great points, but I'm on the opposite side while being in a similar user group. I never used Arch, but I used Gentoo for a few years and did LFS a couple times. Now I'm using Aurora/Bazzite on my workstations. I hack around on my machines a lot but sometimes I just like stuff that works too. When I need to get some development done, I don't want to run into the weird bit of configuration left over from some previous project. I like that it pushes users towards encapsulation mechanisms like flatpaks and devcontainers. It keeps the core cleaner and more stable. The tradeoffs of having to bake extra packages into a container somewhere usually aren't too bad.
SUSE Micro uses btrfs + snapper to make read-only snapshots for it to be immutable. So, yes it's very nearly the same.
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.
...supposed you're using a distro that isn't broken, of course. You can't drive a car that doesn't start, either. You're using an exception to prove the general case. That's not a valid argument.
Why would you expect the general case to go wrong? Of course an error is the exception. Cars don't have seatbelts and airbags for general driving operation. They are there for the exceptional case something goes wrong. Most people will never need them in their life.
I don't see how this contradicts my statement. You can't make a general comparison between specimina of anything if one of your samples is broken.
What are you on about? You wanted to know what could go wrong during package install. I listed possibilities. You can't just dismiss them as exceptional when the whole point of the snapshots is to guard against exceptional failures.
Finally! Thank you. Makes lots of sense. I've fucked up at least two systems in my life by messing with drivers/settings when I didn't know what I was doing. That would have certainly helped. I'll have to check it bazzite. I game too through Steam/Proton and it's not exactly a 100% match in terms of performance when compared to Windows.
I decided to go with an immutable distro for my first Linux gaming PC because immutable distros are as idiot proof as you can get. I like that I can't really mess anything up and if something does break, I can rollback to a previous version. I'm sure there are ways to setup rollback for other distros but I'm not a Linux person so I don't really know what I'm doing and letting Bazzite handle everything for me made it a perfect fit.
Everything has been smooth sailing with Bazzite so far.
Preventing supply chain attacks for one.