Immutable Distros: What you should know - An introduction into image based systems (Part 1)
Good idea. I've never used it or saw it recommended that much.
Can you tell me more about it?
Do you think there's a big need for laptops with way less than 4 GB RAM? I'd say no, because there are barely any this old devices around, and most people here ask for their gaming PC or a mid range laptop.
I'm just afraid people tend to overestimate their need to choose a "lightweight" distro and then complain that it feels old and barebones and that "Linux sucks, I go back to Windows because Steam behaves weird".
Can you tell me your experience and provide more information?
Thanks for the feedback!
I recently made a post here just for that case! :D https://feddit.de/post/8234416
I've just made a post where I explained my points I have against it, but want others to give some input and tell me if I'm wrong. Feel free to join the discussion! :) https://feddit.de/post/9042712
I think you should check out Bazzite or uBlue.
They're both based on the immutable versions of Fedora, but more or less slightly tweaked.
I would recommend them over Nobara. Nobara is very insecure and a one-man-project, and I don't know if that are criteria for a solid distro.
The atomic Fedora spins on the other hand have many advantages:
- secure
- self maintaining and easy to use
- unbreakable, and you can roll back easily in case something breaks
- work out of the box
- you can select the
-nvidiaimages and then your drivers are already baked in, since they are known to break or cause problems.
Bazzite is an attempt to "clone" SteamOS/ Nobara, and provides you with a great out of the box gaming setup.
The other uBlue spins are more vanilla and general purpose.
You could also check out VanillaOS, which is currently under development, but very focused on simplicity and newcomers.
Your questions:
- Nvidia: see my uBlue answer. They're baked in and the best setup. If you want a traditional mutable distro, like Fedora, Mint, etc., you can install them with one click, but they might cause problems.
- Game compatibility: look at protondb.com A lot of Anticheat software works, but a lot more don't. Depends. Remember to activate Proton in Steam, or most games don't get shown.
- Modding software should also work, check out Bottles (Wine), but you might have to allow access to the corresponding directories, since Windows apps should and get sandboxed.
- X/ Wayland: Just try WL and see if it causes problems. With the proprietary Nvidia drivers, and especially Gnome, it should work fine and is in general way better (smoother, etc.) than X
There's a big shift happening right now, you're right on that.
Traditionally, ARM is not as capable in solving complex issues, but more efficient.
That's why it has always been used on smartphones for example. You want a lot of battery and don't need to do highly complex stuff on that, that's what you have your PC for.
The big focus in the last years has always been to top the competitor in terms of performance, and only right now, people begin to question if the computing power they have right now isn't enough and if they rather wouldn't like to have a device that's more efficient.
The tradeoff is, you're more limited to this specific architecture. Apple solved this by making a compatibility layer for x86 apps, but that of course comes with a performance hit.
I'm no expert in that topic tho, so take all I said with a lil grain of salt.
Right now, I think you're better off with x86, because your server will definitely run on some sort of Linux, and we don't have any compatibility layer or something like that yet.
I think 4 a year is better than 3. With 4, you can just do a quarterly thread, which is easier.
I think the concept of megathreads could be executed a bit better. In the way it is suggested in the post, it's only a poll about preferences and popular choices we all use anyway.
I'm thinking about the idea to make a weekly category collection, where we can discuss specific things in more detail.
E.g. "[Weekly thread] What browser do you use? (07/2024)", where we can debate why one prefers Mull over Fennec, what problems we had with Vanadium, and so on.
Or, what niche apps we found this month.
Or, what FOSS app exceeds it's proprietary counterpart.
And so on, and so on. I can give you 20 topic suggestions in less than 2 minutes 😅
This would generate much more engagement and value imo.
And then, we can just simply link each weekly discussion in the quarterly mega thread with one bottom line each.
In that way, everyone would have more resources to read further into, and it's more organized.
Also, this would prevent routine. We don't need a "Which gallery app do you use, and why is it simple gallery?" every time.
We can come up with many new ideas each week, and then, every megathread is different and still worth reading into a few years from now.
Getting more than one vote is simple, too simple. It should be linked with why you think that way and use that tool.
Lemmy is a discussion site, not one for popular opinions and polls. I think engagement is the highest priority, both for strengthening the community, and for the SEO to rank Lemmy higher than Reddit some time in the future 🙃
And linking it to upvotes is bad, that's not the purpose of them. We can still upvote suggestions we disagree with, but that are argued good and add value.
Tittle Im thinking: [Megathread] FOSS Apps — Lemmy Edition | You like? Or do you want another?
Not recognizable enough imo. It will go under in less than a year. What about
[Megathread] Summary of your favourite FOSS Android apps | Community picks for Q3-2024!
?
Feel free to discuss!
I like Prompt.
I use Silverblue and a lot of Distrobox containers, which is why I enjoy it that much.
I discovered it through Bazzite.
Before that, I used Gnome Console or Black Box, because they're based on Libadwaita, good looking and very simple, which is enough for my needs.
Where I live, electricity is also very expensive. I monitor every watt.
I asked the same question half a year ago, here's what I've learnt: RPis tend to be less reliable and aren't that energy efficient. They're great for small appliances, but for servers (e.g. NAS) not as much.
Get an used Thinclient/ mini PC. They cost something between 50-150€ and give you a huge performance boost, more ports, a x86 architecture, are better repairable (still often bad) and more.
Mine uses about 10-15 W on normal use, and 20 rarely when my cloud is under heavy use.
Until Windows makes an update and breaks every one of those two others. No.
Windows is very territorial and often breaks the bootloader. The best way would be to install one distro at one drive, but if that's impossible right now, dual booting should be alright. Just be aware of the warning.
Read my reply from above. I personally would definitely recommend an image based distro.
They only seem complicated for advanced Linux users because they're different, but for noobs, they're similar to Android. Getting your system managed automatically and not having to care about anything is great!
Also, for Nvidia users, there's always the chance of the install breaking, and then they have to troubleshoot.
On Fedora Atomic for example, your now bricked OS is just one image rollback (takes 10 seconds btw) away from working again like nothing happened.
They also provide a great ootb experience, especially the uBlue images, where small tweaks were applied and Nvidia drivers are already baked in.
Another recommendation might be Vanilla OS. It will soon receive a huge update and be completely different. But that will take a few months until released.
Nobara? No way! It's very insecure.
- It's a one man project. If the dev quits, we're all fucked
- It disables many security features, like SELinux
- It receives updates very late, including security patches
- It's experimental and might be unreliable
If you want a "proper" gaming distro, check out Bazzite.
It's very similar to Nobara, but managed automatically due to the uBlue base, and way more secure and reliable.
Original replier here 😁
They are all very similar.
- Fedora (Workstation) is the "OG" Fedora. It's the oldest and most wide spread one, and often considered as the best Ubuntu alternative because of its sane defaults and big community. I used it for years and it was good.
- Silverblue is the "new" "immutable" variant. Check out my post why image based distros are so awesome. https://feddit.de/post/8234416 On the surface, it behaves exactly like the normal Fedora, but under the hood, it's indestructible. There are other flavours of this atomic Fedora variant with KDE and more DEs too if you want.
- uBlue is basically a "tool" to make custom Fedora Atomic installs. To make very deep changes in the immutable Fedora, you have to change the image itself. And those said custom images provide huge QoL benefits and better hardware support, especially for Nvidia.
- And Bazzite is one variant of uBlue. It's a gaming distro and provides many tweaks and tools ootb. I'm using it too on my gaming PC and the performance difference is noticeable.
I recommend Fedora Atomic because, especially uBlue, "just works". If something should ever break, you can easily roll back. And the small tweaks provided by uBlue provide you a very sane system out of the box.
It's way easier to learn imo than traditional systems. Yes, you might have to learn how to use distrobox, but that's one single tool. Learning how to troubleshoot a whole OS is way harder, and you don't have to worry about managing your OS.
What I wouldn't recommend is Nobara. It's a one-man-project and very very insecure. Either go with the official Fedora, or go with uBlue.
I don't think you will loose anything.
You can reinstall another distro onto the current configuration, and it will use that.
But I personally would recommend just doing a clean install in the way the distro recommends it, or you might run into some problems.
You have to backup first anyway.
With "gave me the fewest issues" you probably mean stuff like screen tearing, flickering, etc.?
That's because Pop ships with Nvidia drivers, which many other distros, like Ubuntu, often don't do due to licensing.
As I said, it is pretty old and didn't receive any bigger updates in the last 2 years.
The devs of Pop are currently very busy creating the new DE and don't have much time left for their current distro.
Maybe check out something that's more maintained.
If you just installed it freshly, switching shouldn't be a big issue. You can recreate everything Pop has on Fedora (uBlue silverblue-nvidia) or other Gnome based distros too and get the newest stuff, which will hugely increase the chances of everything working good with your setup.
What specific things do you like on Pop the most? Only the "just works"?
Is there any reason for you to use the LTS version of Pop?
I mean, recommending someone to jump from one to another distro because one thing doesn't work is bad advice, but if you don't have any compelling reasons to use the very outdated stale version, I'd recommend switching to either the normal non-LTS version, or to another distro all together.
If you decide for the latter, maybe consider Bazzite (for gaming) or uBlue. They both have a Nvidia -variant with the drivers already baked in.
Those drivers are known to break or be unreliable, so you always have the certainty that everything will work on this immutable system.
They both are very modern, offering the newest desktop versions, and should provide you a great monitor setup due to the new display protocol.
Do you have the proprietary Nvidia drivers installed?
Maybe also try different settings, like 150 instead of 125%, etc.
Just use distrobox, especially for developing software.
Not only because of the versioning, but also because it's more reliable and easier to manage/ contain in a distrobox container.
I've been using this for a long time now, and it's godsend.
Sending files between iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and other devices is great!
I would recommend Fedora Kinoite.
Yes, you said no RedHat stuff, but Fedora is 100% community run.
Especially when you use the Kinoite-build from universal-blue.org, everything should work ootb and is very reliable, while also being semi-stable in terms of update frequency
Yeah, of course you can!