I am playing around with Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon and I really like the painless updates.
Still, my daily driver for some years now is Debian, and I have a decent setup via Ansible - everything just works for me.
My question is mostly to long term Linux users, which use Linux in a professional context and jumped from a distribution like Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE or Debian to NixOS, Silverblue, Aeon etc.
What is your experience? How did your workflows change on your immutable Linux distribution? Did you try immutable and went back to a more traditional distribution - why? How long are you running the immutable distribution and what issues and perks did you run into?
I think there’s just not enough people who run them. I think the closest you’ll find is the nixos crowd.
I’ve wanted to give silverblue a go, but I know how to manage my fedora install pretty well and don’t feel like taking on a new project like that when at the end of the day I just want to load up steam and decompress. I have a feeling that the majority people who want to try it are in same place I am.
Though it’s getting more and more tempting to switch since the vast majority of my data and packages are installed in my home.
yep…same here.
Also, I use VSCode which incorporates all the toolings that I have installed and also frequently use in a terminal. For an immutable system, I’d have to use the Flatpak version of VScode, which cannot access these toolings from the host.
So, no immutability for me now.
This isnt’t the case for NixOS. I use VsCode and all I need to do is open it by typing “codium .” after direnv loads the flake file which points to all of my dependencies. I don’t use flatpak and I’m able to provision ALL of the tooling in a way that lives with the project rather than on my machine, needing to be manually updated.
When you say “with the project”… you mean, you load up a typescript project, so you can use npm, etc. but you cannot use golang toolings within that same VScode window, and vice versa?
You can actually use distrobox to set up a regular version of Fedora, set up VSCode there using the official Microsoft RPM and keep all your code in there.
I know, but then again… it’s just another layer of maintenance.
Don’t get me wrong. Distrobox is a wonderful piece of software. I use Arch inside DB to run some non-crucial stuff that’s not available in the fedora repos/copr, like lycheeslicer.
But having a working and reliable code environment is something I’d really not want to babysit.
I dont run fedora silverblue for my maindesktop. But my laptop and my Ybox (my budget itx build for portable gaming and lan partys) Both run fedora silverblue and Ublue my ybox runs bazzite nvidia because it has a 1060 and my laptop runs fedora silverblue 47 (i like older version better) And they have been great. There are a few work arounds and tweaks but once you get it setup its rock soild.
