Sup penguin people.
I’ve been running various flavours and variations of Ubuntu for a while. I find I have to nuke and reset my laptop every 6ish months because things eventually stop working or I get weird bugs.
Recently I’ve been having this on and off problem where the computer just shows a black screen after turning it on. The only way to fix this is to tap keys repeatedly until a console shows up and it seems to kick the computer into gear and log in. Other times I have to restart 2-3 times before it logs me in.
I’ve had a lot of small issues like that (like having to jiggle the volume knob in the sound mixer to get sound working) and I’m wondering if switching to an immutable distro (like bazzite) would solve this apparent config creep.
I have a Steamdeck and it’s been solid and stable ever since I got it. I know it’s running an immutable distro and after researching a little bit it sounds like they can be more stable.
I’m no power user but I play some steam games and run a local 7b LLM and like to have a virtual machine or two for Windows XP emulation for some retro gaming.
Anyone have any opinions? What are your thoughts on immutable distros (like Bazzite)? Pros? Cons? Success/doom stories?
Edit: I’m back baby. 4 months later and still kicking it with Bazzite. Go immutable if you’re a former windows person and needs a computer to just work the way you’d expect without any configuration. I’m running all my steam games and plugging into my usb c dock for mouse keyboard webcam and 2 1080p monitor. I could never get that working on other distros. The future is immutable 🙌
Vanilla OS 2.0 looks promising in my opinion. But it's not out yet unfortunately. It's an immutable distro that has integrated containers for all the main Linux distros. You can for example install Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch stuff on the same machine.
Do you mean that there are integrated virtual machines?
no, a container is not a virtual machine. Containers, unlike virtual machines, uses the same kernel as host system. That means you cannot spin up a windows container on linux because windows uses NT kernel and linux uses linux kernel. What containers like that will in fact do is allow you to get applications from different distros as if you were running that distro.
For your use case (windows xp game emulation) there are two options. A virtual machine or using wine. My suggestion is to try first "bottles" and then VM
Yeah kinda. A container has a lot better performance than a virtual machine and can interact with your system