this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Switch from Ubuntu to something immutable? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 🙌

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[–] poki@discuss.online 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Thank you so much for the reply!

I really wanted to like it. I've used ansible and puppet for work and there, declarative configuration made sense because I need to duplicate the same thing 1000's of times.

NixOS really seems like a perfect fit in your case.

For desktop, it was incredibly annoying to me to have to change my config file every time I wanted to install a new application.

Interesting. All the declarative distros (I know) operate like that; at least to ensure being declarative. Would you prefer it if a <insert favorite package manager> install <insert name of package> would automatically modify configuration.nix?

I still found myself messing with drivers which I hate on any OS.

Fair. Hopefully work on official FOSS drivers provided by Nvidia (and others) will resolve this problem for good in the near future.

When the Bazzite install went well and 99% of the applications I wanted to install were flatpaks anyway, it was a perfect fit. I've been running docker containers on my Ubuntu server for years so BoxBuddy was a natural fit for things that aren't flatpaks (minecraft runs great in one). What's more, KDE has a lot of keyboard combinations the same as Windows by default which made the switch even better for me. One that I had been fighting to add to gnome, which is admittedly small but annoying, the ability to use Meta+period to bring up an emoji selector, was built right into KDE by default?! I couldn't believe it.

Then, I started looking for an equivalent to FancyZones found in Windows PowerToys and... What do you know, that's also built into KDE by default?

Then a friend of mine gave me an AMD graphics card he was getting rid of which was an upgrade to my GTX 1060 I've been using since 2018. Since I had already moved to Bazzite, it was a simple re-base to move to the AMD version and it went off without a hitch.

It's all over, Bazzite and KDE are home for me now.

I'm glad to hear that you've been enjoying Bazzite and KDE!

FWIW, if you'd like to explore how declarative Fedora Atomic (and uBlue, hence Bazzite) are in their current iterations, then perhaps it's worth looking at BlueBuild and uBlue's own documentation on this. Though, I imagine that (based on your previous experience with NixOS) you wouldn't necessarily approve of this. Though, I suppose drivers should work this time around.