While shopping around for a distro for my gaming box, I tried NixOS and Bazzite. Both were fine, but the atomicity made everything more complicated without any practical upsides for my use case.

So I’m just using Nobara, which is a gaming-optimized Fedora. For my laptop, I’m just using Arch, it’s much less hassle. The declarativeness of centralization of NixOS is alluring, but I don’t really need it.

I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.

I love to install Atomic distributions for less technically savvy people. Reducing the conflict and issue potential.

I run Bazzite on a HTPC, and it’s great, but I’m still deciding what to put on my daily driver PC, which needs to be able to do things like gaming and coding. As you also pointed out, Fedora atomic distros don’t like VPN clients that aren’t already packaged neatly as an RPM.

In light of that, you can either try to build your own custom downstream derivation that pulls from the upstream image of your choice (Universal Blue has instructions and a template for doing this) and make customizations to the system at build time, go with something like Blue Build, or go for a traditional mutable distro.

I’ve been trying to get Private Internet Access to install at build time on my own custom attempt, but so far, it’s been a failure. I’ve also tried on other immutable distros that use ostree alternatives, and they’ve also failed. I may just have to concede the client and only use the preset OVPN configurations, or I may need to move onto mutable options.

I haven’t used one, but my guess would be they’re fine if you’re a “web browsing and email” sort, but most of us here probably aren’t, and then you’re going to have pain when you need to install some tool that expects to be installed globally, because so many pieces of open source software assume the “spew files all over /usr” installation method.

Feels like you’d be spending a lot of time fighting expectations in the same way that Nix has to.

After using Fedora Atomic for around a year, I’ve switched my mom over from Linux Mint. Since then a few years’ve gone by and there’s been no issues with automatic updates failing or not applying. That’s awesome compared to regular issues with dpkg errors because of shutdown/power loss while updating.

Obviously release upgrades still require manual intervention, but that’s an hour once a year for updating and testing if everything works as it should.

Personally I’ve switched to NixOS, because even with ublue image-based OS aren’t great for configuring window managers. In general, image-based OS are especially awesome for long-running, low maintenance systems. I wouldn’t want to use an OS which doesn’t provide some kind of rollbacks anymore (btrfs snapshots is the minimum).

Edit:

Do you feel it’s worth it to learn the nuances of their use?

Fedora Atomic is almost identical to regular Fedora, the difference is mostly how the root filesystem is managed:

The former are files from rpms get copied to an ostree image, which then gets mounted as the root file system.

For the latter dnf copies files from rpms to the root file system.

[…] did you manage to properly run AppImages […]

They always worked flawlessly on everything except NixOS (because of no FHS-layout). Through distrobox they should work on any distro.

[…] trying to install Outline VPN […]).

These kinds of not properly packaged apps are a big issue with ostree based systems. VPN provider apps need to be natively installed and usually aren’t available in repos.

As I have been using Silverblue for enough time, I would say that splitting between the base OS and the apps is an important thing but atomicity/immutability of the base system is not so much.

For example: I also use QubesOS and it gives quite immutable-like experience while the base distro is a regular non-atomic Fedora.

By using flatpaks (or snaps) or tools like distrobox on a regular distro you will get a similar experience.

The main think is to cut dependencies between apps and the os and to be able to update them independently.

And then, when you have the apps separated, there are just not many reasons against choosing an immutable distro for the base system because it gives you additional bonus things as safe updates and rollbacks. But you can use a non-immutable distro as well if you want a specific or a niche distro (for example Chimera Linux or Alpine).

I tried Fedora Silverblue.
Didn’t see the point. Anything that needs access to system files can’t be installed as a FlatPak or in a container.
When you need to alter the install image just to get htop or Gnome Tweaks, it defeats the purpose of running an atomic distro.

And I didn’t see any benefit. It was buggier than all other distros I tried except Ubuntu. So the selling point of “the devs test on the exact same system you run” doesn’t seem to have any effect. And I wasn’t in a situation where I would have needed to roll back to a previous state in years. Linux doesn’t really bork your install with an update anymore.

It’s pretty useful for systems you want to be reliable but don’t need too many customisations (like Bazzite on gaming machines).

Although if we’re counting NixOS, it’s the declarative config aspect that is the main selling point for me, with atomic updates just being part of it.

I switched to Silverblue and it is fine

I’m testing OpenSUSE Kalpa on an old machine, and I guess it’s alright if you do standard normie things. I found there are tools I want that aren’t available. There are usually a way around that, but it takes some faffing around. But I tend to want to customize and control my system in a way that is ideologically almost antithetical to immutable distros, so, meh. But YMMV.

I like the idea of immutable distros a lot, but I realised they are not for me, at least not now.

I couldn’t install global themes because the SDDM is immutable. There is a workaround, but it didn’t work 100% for me.

I couldn’t get Steam to put shortcuts on the desktop (it’s a known thing, simply I didn’t know it). It only worked with Bazzite which comes with Steam preinstalled. But then I couldn’t edit these shortcuts (for example: -silent) because if I did, they would vanish.

Then I experimented with Waydroid. There was something I wanted to test but couldn’t use the online advice because Bazzite/Aurora doesn’t have dnf for example.

There were other little things I’m used to tinker on my system and couldn’t so I realised, I wanna stick with other distros for the moment.