I’ve got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I’ve been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while… I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.
Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?
Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn’t a favorite these days though).
Maybe Fedora Silverblue? Bluefin is built on top of Fedora anyways. You will find more support online for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite over Bluefin.
I know Bazzite over Silverblue/Kinoite can make sense so that you can have RPM steam and also not deal with the Nvidia driver hassle on immutable distros, but the advantages of using Bluefin is a bit unclear.
Reason to use Bluefin is to not have any proprietary software (aka Steam) included while still having all the open source bells and whistles from Universal Blue (Distrobox, Just, brew, devcontainers, fzf, ripgrep, etc).
Though I guess Bluefin does include the proprietary nvidia drivers.
You will find more support online for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite over Bluefin.
And we will be the first to tell you that most of that doesn’t apply.
All distros are immutable if you lost your root password.
I think NixOS is the way to go currently, but I personally would not use it due to the extra amount of work for little to no benefit on a single-user home machine.
If you don’t like Gnome, use Aurora (the sister distro of Bluefin and Bazzite).
I used to play around with Aeon (built from opensuse). But it’s locked to Gnome only. I’d stick with Aurora or Bazzite instead.
Second Aurora I am happy with it for my notebook
NixOS is surely what I’d recommend.
I like to tinker with an Arch Linux install using a VM to iterate quickly then translate almost ALL of the home dotfiles and preferences to deterministic nix code that absolutely LOCKS everything into place.
Some essential features/projects to incorporate into a decent nix config:
- nix flakes
- home-manager
- content-addressed and dynamic derivations (Eelco’s original paper writes about CA derivations as the holy grail)
- cachix (local cache) and community substituters
- forgejo (local forge with local CI to test nix flake updates for breakage and warm the local cache) I call it my “update canary”)
- nixos-anywhere/netboot/initrd boot scripting influenced by NixOS-anywhere but extended
- disko
- impermanance (lots of work up front declaring what persists between boots but this one is ESSENTIAL. This module makes it virtually impossible for a compromised package or virus to survive a reboot if things are done right.)
- sops-nix
- nixos-needs-reboot
- devenv/direnv
I’m definitely going to at least try nixos. I’ve been reading tbe manual since yesterday and it looks pretty nice.
It’s really powerful.
As a proponent of better, faster, more foolproof, and more elegant, I’m often jealous of some of the features that our brothers in GUIX are building with the benefit of hindsight. Also, I will admit that it really feels like NixOS is doing the hard work exploring a paradigm (and its inherent rough edges) that will effectively obsolete FHS entirely in the Linux world someday.
I’m a big proponen5 of bazzite. Been daily driving it on my laptop for well over a year (check my post history for details). Never needed to go into the command line to fix anything, never needed to worry about drivers. Basically as stable as windows (not now since windows actually is unstable with their vibe coded updates).
I wish I had more experience with other immutable distros but Fedora Silverblue has been so stable on both my laptop and PC the past couple years that I haven’t had any reason to try anything else.
I like the universal blue distros. If your laptop specs aren’t great I would recommend Zirconium, as it’s a Niri-based atomic distro and runs great on my 10yo laptop. Bluefin is gnome based, Aurora is the KDE-based equivalent. Bazzite has both KDE and Gnome variants, and is similar to either of them but with more game tools steam installed at the system level. I am biased towards these distros because they’ve been the best linux user experience I’ve ever had for day to day use.
Side question: you bought a laptop but don’t know what specs it has? How did that happen?
OP doesn’t say they bought it, only it’s coming to them.
I didn’t buy it. I’m just inheriting it from someone that doesn’t want it and isn’t really tech savvy at all. They’re dropping it off on their way through town heading elsewhere. Easier just to check myself when it arrives than try to explain how to find out for me. I just know it’s running windows (10 if I had to guess).
Makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact that you described it as “a refurb” and assumed you had bought something refurbished.
I’m currently working on one, will release the website this weekend and the first public in-development build next week. I’m combining the kernels and CPU-specific optimizations from CachyOS (compiled and hosted myself to be in line with their repo policy and licenses) combined with the way SteamOS makes Arch-Linux atomic/immutable, implemented a little more to the way Fedora Silverblue does it. So pretty much unbreakable PLUS fast and optimized.
depending on your needs, putting nix on an immutable distro is a very good combination. people around here fiddle with kionite plus nix. seems cool so far.
