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KDE Linux has an “immutable base OS”, shipped as a single read-only image. Btrfs is the base file system, Wayland is the display server, PipeWire is the sound server, Flatpak gets you apps, and Systemd is the glue to hold everything together.
I’ve been interested in the immutable OSes like Bazzite, but I haven’t tried any yet. Anyone else have experience with it?
Bazzite is very solid, it just keeps working
They’re good as a gaming/day to day use distros. It’s a bit annoying when you start needing to install things on the root level. It’s doable, but not as straightforward as on your regular distro. I have bazzite htpc as my basement steam console and it’s been fantastic (one issue with suspension but no big deal, I just shut it down when I’m done).
I also have it on a laptop that I use sometimes before bed to watch something or do something on the browser. They’re great if you want something that just works.
My main rig runs cachy OS.
I tried VanillaOS for a bit but not for long enough to really get into it. One challenge I had was limited Linux experience, and Vanilla wrote their own everything. I found it to be a bit too much for the light experimenting I like to do.
Haven’t tried any others yet.
It does sound like it could become a solid option for people wanting to ditch Windows and want a simple, easy to use distro that just works out of the box with GUIs for everything they’ll ever want to do so they never have to touch the oh ever so intimidating terminal.
Well, only the base OS in /usr is immutable; /etc is writable for making system-level config changes, and your entire home folder is of course yours to do what you want with, including installing software into it. So that’s what you do: use Discover to get software, mostly from Flathub at this point in time, but Snap is also technically supported and you can use snap in a terminal window (support in Discover may arrive later).
That’s fine for apps in Flathub and the Snap Store, but what about software not available there? What about CLI tools and development libraries?
Containers offer a modern approach: essentially you download a tiny tiny Linux-based OS into a container, and then you can install whatever that OS’s own package management system provides into the container. KDE Linux ships with support for Distrobox and Toolbx.
It sounds like more work for the user than a single system-wide package manager. And in my experience there are some applications that are not designed for sandboxed installations, where you have to fiddle around with the sandbox settings to get things to work. I’ve become frustrated by this in the past and ended up going back to system-level, unsandboxed packages. Likewise, managing containers for CLI applications can be great or it can be a pain for similar reasons. Some things are just easiest when fully integrated with the OS, though it brings security and stability risks. So I haven’t been won over by immutable distros yet but I’ll be interested to see whether KDE Linux can soften some of these hard edges for the user. It sounds like they do want it to be viable for non-experts coming from Windows.
I really hope they make it so you can very easily customize and then make an installable copy of your system, like MX Linux does.
Currently making one for my mom and dad in MX since they’re basically the only ones who have something like that these days, and their Linux installs are too old for them to update anymore.
Shipping them a USB with an installer that’s easy to use with the software they’ll use already installed, and Librewolf already configured, would make this awesome.
