So, I recently got interested with the idea of an atomic distro, particularly the derivatives of Fedora Kinoite (currently testing Aurora).
What’s your experience with them? What are the unexpected troubles and did you manage to resolve them? Do you feel it’s worth it to learn the nuances of their use?
Also, on a personal testing note, did you manage to properly run AppImages and what did you do to make it happen? I couldn’t properly run them either natively or via Fedora toolbox on Aurora. (Also, I borked Aurora within 4 hours of trying to install Outline VPN that consistently had issues with tunneling).
While shopping around for a distro for my gaming box, I tried NixOS and Bazzite. Both were fine, but the atomicity made everything more complicated without any practical upsides for my use case.
So I’m just using Nobara, which is a gaming-optimized Fedora. For my laptop, I’m just using Arch, it’s much less hassle. The declarativeness of centralization of NixOS is alluring, but I don’t really need it.
I will say that Bazzite and the rest of the Universal Blue distros are going to be moving to bootc eventually, which should hopefully make things much easier for end-users to customize. Layering with rpm-ostree is fine for a lot of people, but only if your software can be found via the Fedora free and non-free repos or comes as an RPM.
It’s great for most, and they have a lot of additional ujust commands to make other changes, but doing things like ricing or installing a proprietary binary can be tricky or impossible.
I haven’t used one, but my guess would be they’re fine if you’re a “web browsing and email” sort, but most of us here probably aren’t, and then you’re going to have pain when you need to install some tool that expects to be installed globally, because so many pieces of open source software assume the “spew files all over /usr” installation method.
Feels like you’d be spending a lot of time fighting expectations in the same way that Nix has to.
I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”
As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.
I love to install Atomic distributions for less technically savvy people. Reducing the conflict and issue potential.
If we’re talking email and docs and stuff, doesn’t it make sense to install something like Debian, properly set it up and leave it be?
Sounds like an option that really really wouldn’t ever bork.
That’d work, too. But doing that I still had to occasionally/rarely fix my relatives laptops. I think after some of the major updates and the stupid Brother printer drivers messed up and needed manual intervention. But Debian is pretty stable. But with that said, it’s not the only option. I can imagine an atomic distro doing a good job, too. And being low maintenance, or at least fail in a way my mom could handle. I mean that’s how some modern devices work anyways. Be atomic, have A/B updates…
Atomic distributions have read only filesystems for nearly anything but /home, it makes it way more reliant against loss of power then just a normal Debian. I had a few people with distributions that broke due to filesystems corruption.
It is more complex not less. Maybe one day it will be hassle free but that day isn’t right now
I run Bazzite on a HTPC, and it’s great, but I’m still deciding what to put on my daily driver PC, which needs to be able to do things like gaming and coding. As you also pointed out, Fedora atomic distros don’t like VPN clients that aren’t already packaged neatly as an RPM.
In light of that, you can either try to build your own custom downstream derivation that pulls from the upstream image of your choice (Universal Blue has instructions and a template for doing this) and make customizations to the system at build time, go with something like Blue Build, or go for a traditional mutable distro.
I’ve been trying to get Private Internet Access to install at build time on my own custom attempt, but so far, it’s been a failure. I’ve also tried on other immutable distros that use ostree alternatives, and they’ve also failed. I may just have to concede the client and only use the preset OVPN configurations, or I may need to move onto mutable options.
