Hey, does anyone here have strong opinions or real experience with atomic distributions, like Fedora Silverblue? I am considering it for a professional laptop, where I want to avoid components breaking so the immutability and containerization is something that sounds good. And I have come to terms with GNOME, so that is not an issue for me at least. What I worry about is, e.g. with Fedora Silverblue, that my previous experience with regular Fedora always degraded after an upgrade or two, and I don't know if this is something that Silverblue can help me here.

I do not think that an operating system that has immutable components is a good idea, as it limits freedom. If you want immutable system areas, use macOS.

I have limited experience using them; I don't see any personal purpose in using an atomic system-- I'm familiar with Linux, I enjoy tinkering --that being said, for users that don't understand how Linux works, it's a great option.
I have a few tech-illiterate friends, who were hit by Windows 10 end-of-support, and wanted to test out Linux, but got scared away from the terminal; they do fine with flaks and Fedora Silverblue.

There are a few different definitions floating around the past few years. There are different concepts and components that can be qualified as atomic/immutable, sometimes joined together, sometimes not. It's a patchwork.

I'm not a fan for example of the universal package managers, but I do see the appeal for certain things. Yet, I do enjoy relying on docker/container to test software without having to taint my system.
Similarly, immutable sometimes rhyme with reproducible, and I've seen a lot of people enjoy NixOS and the Nix package manager. There's an appeal to having separate versions of the same software and swapping them whenever you feel like it. Personally, it was way too heavy and complex for me to run.
Furthermore, you need to add to these the idea of a system core that is the same for everyone, versioned (signed too), and having the user changes separate from it. The atomic updates. Things like homed, projects like os-tree, etc.. I like the concept, but personally I don't rely on these, I just manually keep track of my stuff.
With all that when things are containerized they often can't talk through the usual channels so you need a common communication which in this case is always dbus. This comes with standards like desktop-portals, polkit for security, pipewire for the media pipeline, etc.. I do think that's a good direction for the Linux desktop, building on the freedesktop standards.

With all this, there's also the secure distros that are somewhat immutable because they choose to run everything within VMs, like QubeOS. I've never tried it, but I'm wondering how fast of a machine you need to be able to do that. Maybe someone can enlighten us on this.

venam:

Quote:I've seen a lot of people enjoy NixOS and the Nix package manager.

I've always wanted to try Guix, for a similar reason. Yes, QubesOS needs a beefy machine.