Post #3930761
2026-07-19 09:13 UTC
Replies (7)
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@BeardedBlaze@lemmy.world 2026-07-19 13:13
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an update on a mutable system fuck my shit up to a point I just reinstalled the distro. Not having to worry about that is my primary reason for moving to immutable system. While malware and viruses are still mostly prevalent in the windows world, Linux isn’t immune to it. That is, unless it’s an immutable distro.
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@hperrin@lemmy.ca 2026-07-19 15:14
Run an update on a traditional system, and pull the power plug out when it’s half way through. If it recovers when you reboot it, you got pretty lucky. Now do the same with an immutable system like Bazzite. It will be running the pre-update image when you reboot it. No harm done. It’s essentially impossible for an update (or even a failed update) to brick the system. You can always roll back to the last working image.
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@Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world 2026-07-19 21:05
I tried bazzite and kinoite and they are great. Unfortunately I don’t have a souped up gaming pc and I found them a little on the slow side compared to other distros… I’ve been using NixOS for a couple of months and I am loving it. The system is responsive, the boot time is half that of bazzite and while perhaps it isn’t ideal for someone’s very first distro it also isn’t that complicated, if I can figure it out 90% of other users could. I have all my old windows games working and my old hybrid Nvidia card chugging along nicely.
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@Hazzard@lemmy.zip 2026-07-19 22:01
I’ll give my own nerdy answer, besides the “good for amateurs” one. Personally, I’m pretty techy, but I use my PC primarily as a living room gaming PC. As such, keeping it working is paramount, besides that I keep tinkering with it anyway. I was afraid an immutable OS would limit my tinker projects, but I’ve found it to be a total non-issue. Even for complex tasks like self-hosting AI to play around with, podman has served admirably. Honestly, it gives me confidence to try more ballsy things than I would otherwise, rather than limiting me. Additionally, I like the feeling that my core system is essentially unbreakable. Even if I ran sudo rm -rf, even I don’t have the access to truly pooch things. Similar deal for any virus or hacker that might access my hardware, you can’t hide weird behaviour deep in my system, it’s immutable. I’ve also crashed my computer a few times by blowing through my VRAM budget while tinkering with self-hosting AI, and such crashes don’t scare me, I’ve got easy rollbacks if I crashed my PC while it was doing something delicate. I’m even running the testing branch right now (I want earlier access to the latest Mesa, as it has bugfixes for the DOOM DLC), and I don’t have to fear anything from an unstable branch. If it breaks, I can trivially rollback and switch branches to the latest stable in a few minutes, with immense confidence. I love the assurance it gives, and the only thing it’s ever blocked me from doing was installing my VPN client, but an OpenVPN config has done that job just fine. I’d consider switching to CachyOS, but the main reason I haven’t is that I’d miss the comfort of my OS being immutable.
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@Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 2026-07-20 03:19
I like Bazzite because it has a bunch of optimisations for getting games runnin well, and because it disallows applications screwing with the system. If I really need an application that demands it’s files be put in a bunch of places I can’t audit easily, it can go in a toolbox and not impact the system, or I can audit exactly what it does and layer it into the system. For a Linux newbie, I really appreciate a system that stays what it is, and doesn’t let anything change that without my explicit approval.
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@giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-07-20 03:51
its a container image with a kernel. the whole idea is reproducibility.
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@FG_3479@lemmy.world 2026-07-20 11:58
It protects against system breakage and malware because the core of the OS is sealed and updates can only fully complete or fully fail, you can’t have a half-uodated system like Ubuntu would be if you unplugged the PC half way through. And because your apps and commandline tools are sandboxed with Flatpak and toolbox/distrobox so malware getting in through one doesn’t compromise the whole system.