Post #2927695
2026-05-28 16:22 UTC
Heyhey, nice overview, though on the “just works” thing on atomic/immutable distros I want to say that that’s not the case by virtue of a system being atomic.
I’m on Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite layers on) and the codecs you’d expect being on there aren’t because of licensing (just like all of Fedora’s distros).
I also don’t believe Fedora Atomic does anything in particular in regards to drivers. So the advantages you’re talking about are there because of the people who worked on Bazzite.
On breakage, it’s definitely not a bad thing for a system to *gently* push users into installing software in user space and with some isolation, but it’s far from a requirement for a stable system.
And if you’re going to be layering everything anyway (so installing basically only installing using rpm-ostree), you’re not gaining much by choosing an atomic distribution. Those layers can conflict because of versions like with any other distro
Fedora KDE, which I ran for almost a year, has not given me any issues except for the codecs which I had to install myself.
It’s actually more of a pain to get codecs to work on Fedora Atomic because of how RPM Fusion needs to work with layering (rpmfusion.org/Howto/OSTree), which wasn’t an issue on standard Fedora.
So you’ll end up needing to manually updating the repository RPM Fusion repository every 6 months. I assume Bazzite handles those kinds of annoyances for you.
Also some software, like Steam, is also a pain to work with when using the Flatpak.
You need to to access and edit your icons folder, access desktop (though the xdg-desktop portal makes that easy), and and an alias so the .desktop files to actually run what you want.
It tries to run “steam”, but because it’s a Flatpak it should be using “flatpak run com.blabla.steam”
VanillaOS (which *doesn’t* use rpm-ostree since it’s based on Debian) and Bazzite are both good Atomic distros if you really want that, while having those kind of annoyances handled for you.
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