Are we going to see arch based immutable distros in the near future?
yala @ yala @discuss.online Posts 1Comments 112Joined 1 yr. ago
yala @ yala @discuss.online
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But have been wondering why I haven’t heard of any immutable distros from arch based distros yet.
If your question is "Why doesn't Arch have its own atomic/immutable spin/flavor like Fedora and openSUSE have in their Silverblue/Kinoite and Aeon/Kalpa respectively?", then the answer simply lies in the fact that Fedora and openSUSE have a lot more incentive for venturing the unexplored waters of atomicity/immutability as their enterprise counterparts exist and will benefit majorly from it. And I haven't even mentioned how most of the new stuff first appear on Fedora (systemd, PipeWire, Wayland etc) before they're adopted on other distros.
The enterprise counterparts also allow funding that is essential for erecting this from the ground. But, even then, the shift towards atomic/immutable is a difficult one with a lot of hardships and complexity. From the ones that have developed their atomic/immutable projects retroactively (so GuixSD and NixOS don't count as they've been atomic/immutable (and declarative) from inception), only Fedora's (I'd argue) have matured sufficiently. But Fedora has been at it since at least 2017, so they've had a head start compared to the others.
In contrast to Debian (through Canonical), Fedora (through Red Hat) and openSUSE (through SuSE), Arch has literally no (in)direct ties to enterprise. Hence, it will only adopt an atomic/immutable variant if the incentive is high from the community or if it's very easy and only comes with major benefits. But, as even openSUSE is currently struggling with their atomic/immutable variants, it has a long road ahead before it becomes something that can be easily adopted by Arch. Hence, don't expect Arch's atomic/immutable variant any time soon.
However, if any derivative suffices, then at least the likes of blendOS, ChimeraOS and even SteamOS are worth mentioning here.
Fam, with al due respect, make up your mind; because, unfortunately, it's not possible to keep up great security practices in conjunction with access to the AUR on a low powered system.
I'd argue that your best bet is probs Kicksecure. Though, I reckon you'll have a hard time on a VM regardless.
I’ve been bouncing between live versions of ubuntu and mint
Ah okay, is this problem on Ubuntu or on Mint (or are you going to tackle it on both 😜)?
I’m still learning, so thank you for educating a linux ignoramus like myself.
It has been my pleasure fam!
I’ve had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn’t game much and doesn’t need various software development tools.
If your friend is familiar around Linux, then I'd advice you to just stick to the distro they're using themselves. That's probably the best course of action.
I advice against using https://distrochooser.de as it's horrendously outdated and doesn't offer accurate information. The results will also bombard you with a bunch of distros that have lost all of their relevance.
I always upgrade as I can't deal with a clean install every so often. This warrants using a distro that does handle this well, though*. Which, thankfully, isn't a big deal as most distros support this anyways.
Based on your history, I'll assume you're on Linux Mint; note that this is crucial information that influences the required instructions. Therefore, consider mentioning the distro you're using next time 😉.
From Linux Mint's release notes, we find the following:
apt install wine-installer
In case this doesn't do it, add sudo and it should work. So, instead we get:
sudo apt install wine-installer.
Tip: consider sticking to documentation and resources provided by the maintainers of your distro.
On a final note, I don't know exactly what your intentions are, but software like Bottles, Conty and/or Lutris are worth mentioning here as they're 'wrappers etc' for Wine.
Excellent contribution. Even if I'm not OP, I really appreciate this. Thank you!
Consider making another post after everything has been done in which you note down your expectations, experiences etc.
But still, this is not GUI friendly if you need random peoples unmonitored code.
Say whatever you will, extensions are a feature and/or design choice of GNOME. One that definitely comes with its own set of implications. But, like always, the user should interact responsibly with it.
I was not referring to a single KDE Extension here. Extensions are a big security issue. Literally nobody is monitoring them. You can be happy if there are people doing badness-enumeration and flagging bad ones.
I'm not a fan of how extensions are handled in general. But some of the the more popular ones are handled by GNOME developers and/or friends. So there's at least some chain of trust.
I agree that GNOME is not perfect. Never implied as such anyway. You've excellently noted some things that are easier to achieve on KDE than on GNOME. However, likewise, GNOME's extensions allow for customization beyond what KDE allows (see e.g. https://material-shell.com/).
Out of the ones provided by UTM, it's Fedora by virtue of SELinux.
Tweakable
Linux Mint scores less favorably on this due the absence of GNOME, KDE or a Window Manager within their offering (though you should be able to install them). Therefore, consider a distro that comes with (in alphabetical order):
- GNOME, if you want customization through extensions
- KDE, if you want built-in customization
- A Window Manager (too many to name), if you feel particularly brave
GUI-friendly
GNOME and KDE score excellent in this regard. Special mention goes out to openSUSE Tumbleweed and Garuda Linux for scoring better on this than most other distros.
Well-documented
The gold standard has been set by Arch and Gentoo. Gentoo is probably too hard for you currently. Arch could work out, but that requires you to do an excellent job at reading through its documentation and acting upon it.
Reasonable gaming compatibility
There shouldn't be a lot of difference between different distros in this regard. However, distros optimized for gaming (like Bazzite, Garuda and Nobara) do tend to score better as they've received patches and whatnot to solve edge cases.
Thoughts?
To conclude, I think you should play around with both GNOME and KDE. After that, consider one of the following distros:
- Arch; this one will undoubtedly teach you the most on Linux. However, you might perceive it as exhausting to keep up with coming from Linux Mint; FYI it's the most hands-on experience, though your mileage may vary*.
- Bazzite; likely to be the most hands-free experience out of these. Documentation does leave some to be desired.
- EndeavourOS; Arch with easier install.
- Garuda Linux; Opinionated Arch. Though, I'd say its defaults are relatively sane
even if I loathe its themes. - openSUSE Tumbleweed; Mostly included for YaST; i.e. its excellent suite of GUI apps that are simply absent on non-SuSE systems. Though, being the gold standard for a stable rolling release distro doesn't hurt either. Documentation is lackluster.
(FWIW, you could also try some spin of Fedora)
My 2 cents.
How did you install it on Debian if you didn't get beyond boot? Or is this on another system?
Thank you for the reply!
I’m not planning to alter the system daily so, admittedly, this is a bespoke, non-trivial process to handle an uncommon use case.
Honestly, I think you're underselling the potential importance this has; I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of users that have tried Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE Aeon or Vanilla OS were simply put off by how long it took them to get going post-installation compared to any other distros they're used to. So, I do believe it's a noble endeavor. However, I'm actually more in favor of educating people on the paradigm shift that comes with an atomic distro.
In general I haven’t run into the kind of issues that immutable distros proport to fix.
That's excellent! If I may ask, which distro(s) do you usually run on your systems?
I would say this is moreso an OCD friendly approach to OS management.
Hehe, great way to put it.
I’m also hoping this setup will basically force me into using Ansible more and manual tweaks less.
Interesting to see you mention Ansible. I'll get to this in a moment.
I feel Guix and NixOS are a bit more in a league of their own due to their declarative nature.
Exactly.
I’m on the fence if I want to go that far.
I believe you're ripe for it; if you want to force yourself into using Ansible, then you might as well commit to GuixSD or NixOS instead.
Again, I’ll admit my knowledge of these systems is based on docs and I’ll probably have much different thoughts getting hands on.
That's fine. We're all continuously educating ourselves.
And my goal is to rely on Flatpak and containers
Interesting! Like, 100% rely on those two only? So not even installing software directly to base system*? This is actually kinda similar to openSUSE's current implementation for its atomic distros**.
but if that was the answer then all the immutable distros out there are about as overbaked as my idea.
I'm not entirely sure if I understood you correctly. But I agree that Flatpak and containers can basically be achieved on any distro out there. No need to go immutable/atomic/composable if you just want Flatpak+containers.
Excellent choice! I'm sure you'll manage 😉 (right after you've found yourself a USB drive).
No need to apologize fam. Thank you for being patient with my questions 😜.
It’s on main fedora
That's were the disparity of our experiences stem from 😉. I'm aware that regular Fedora behaves peculiar for updates. IIRC, the reasoning involved something about ensuring that updates happened offline for the sake of system integrity. Thankfully, Fedora Atomic doesn't have that issue 😊. Thank you clarifying!
Thank you for the elaboration! Quick question;
When I click the option to reboot ans install, it boots to a software update screen
You use the word "boots" here. Then,
it reboots again to the system.
Now, you use reboots accompanies with "again". Therefore, I will assume that the previous "boots" meant to convey a reboot. As for my actual question, does your system do a full reboot the first time? So, is it technically possible to access GRUB in-between and does it ask you to fill in the LUKS-password (if you've enabled FDE) etc?
Finally, is this on Fedora Silverblue? Or just plain ol' classic Fedora?
For me:
and their consequences;
are the primary reasons why I absolutely adore atomic/immutable distros.
Furthermore, it minimizes all kinds of issues related to or caused by bit rot, configuration drift and hidden/unknown states. (Note that you won't reap all of these benefits on all atomic/immutable distros.)