The entire team here at Universal Blue is thrilled to announce that we’ve passed 100,000 weekly active users! It’s hard to believe how far things have come in just the last 5 years. What started as a small project to bring cloud native to the Linux desktop has grown because of the people who believed in it: the contributors who spent nights fixing bugs and reviewing PRs, the folks answering questions in Discord and on the forums at 2 AM, the package maintainers keeping everything running s...
I use it as my work desktop is precisely to stop me pissing about with it. Play with stuff on an appropriate server is the lesson I am trying to teach myself.
Only the main OS image is immutable, but there’s distrobox, homebrew, virtual machines (now moved to bazzite-dx, only a rebase away), lots of ways to install stuff in userspace.
Distroboxes are actually a really good developer workflow (except for system level stuff) once you adapt, install everything needed for a project, develop, archive the environment, all without touching the main OS. Obscure old project with instructions only for Arch, needing old python and CUDA versions, no problem. Super versatile and you never boot to a broken system.
In a pinch you can also change the image with rpm-ostree install.
If its just a gaming PC you really don’t need much outside of the discover store, steam, and a web browser so its fine and probably just a safe move especially if its a shared PC.
Its only really annoying if your gaming rig is your main rig too.
Not quite. I’ve run into a gaming case where immutability becomes a problem: Syncthing.
If you want to synchronize emulator saves between devices then Syncthing is great at that, but it takes a lot to get around the immutability without relying on unmaintained flatpaks (aka Syncthing-gtk). At least not on Steam Deck, which doesn’t have Syncthing baked into the main distro
Syncthingy is just a dashboard. It doesn’t have the service packaged in, you have to set it up separately as a systemd service if it isn’t already included in your distro, which will get rewritten by SteamOS
Maybe this is true for SteamOS, but I am mostly was replying about “great at that, but it takes a lot to get around the immutability without relying on unmaintained flatpaks”.
I use immutable Distro, there is maintained syncthing available as Flatpak, and i did not experienced any problems related to using immutable distribution with syncthing specifically, so eh.
I tried it and I wanted to uninstall Steam because I use Lutris and don’t want something proprietary potentially collecting data. I’m sure it’s possible to do, but I couldn’t be bothered because it’d be going against the grain. I like the concept otherwise, especially for a gaming distro. An immutable gaming / HTPC distro with Plsma Bigscreen and no Steam would be the bees knees.
Thanks, Aurora looks more attractive than Kinoite since it’s more batteries included like Bazzite. As far as Bigscreen, I think that might be possible with rpm-ostree, though my experience with this distro family is limited and not sure how much of a headache that would create.
In general you want to avoid layering packages if possible. But it’s not the end of the world. You can always build your own custom image that updates whenever the base image updates if you need something more customized.
Love my Baazite. The immutability is a bit annoying.
I use it as my work desktop is precisely to stop me pissing about with it. Play with stuff on an appropriate server is the lesson I am trying to teach myself.
It is sort of working.
I’m much happier using homebrew and pip to install things. If I absolutely need to modify system files, I’ll use rpm-ostree.
I feel like it’s been a good thing that my first instinct isn’t to modify system files anymore.
Only the main OS image is immutable, but there’s distrobox, homebrew, virtual machines (now moved to bazzite-dx, only a rebase away), lots of ways to install stuff in userspace.
Distroboxes are actually a really good developer workflow (except for system level stuff) once you adapt, install everything needed for a project, develop, archive the environment, all without touching the main OS. Obscure old project with instructions only for Arch, needing old python and CUDA versions, no problem. Super versatile and you never boot to a broken system.
In a pinch you can also change the image with rpm-ostree install.
I thought the immutability was the reason it was peoples choice over a distro like cachyos.
It is for me, only Ublue distros at home.
For me and my needs it is lol
If its just a gaming PC you really don’t need much outside of the discover store, steam, and a web browser so its fine and probably just a safe move especially if its a shared PC.
Its only really annoying if your gaming rig is your main rig too.
Not quite. I’ve run into a gaming case where immutability becomes a problem: Syncthing.
If you want to synchronize emulator saves between devices then Syncthing is great at that, but it takes a lot to get around the immutability without relying on unmaintained flatpaks (aka Syncthing-gtk). At least not on Steam Deck, which doesn’t have Syncthing baked into the main distro
Wait, what issues? I have it running on my Steam Deck with Bazzite and my PC with Aurora. I didn’t have any issues.
Setup the headless syncthing container it works great.
Have you tried Distrobox?
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.zocker_160.SyncThingy, this one has separate support for Steamos
Syncthingy is just a dashboard. It doesn’t have the service packaged in, you have to set it up separately as a systemd service if it isn’t already included in your distro, which will get rewritten by SteamOS
Maybe this is true for SteamOS, but I am mostly was replying about “great at that, but it takes a lot to get around the immutability without relying on unmaintained flatpaks”. I use immutable Distro, there is maintained syncthing available as Flatpak, and i did not experienced any problems related to using immutable distribution with syncthing specifically, so eh.
It can be both
immutability is one of the reasons I like it.
I tried it and I wanted to uninstall Steam because I use Lutris and don’t want something proprietary potentially collecting data. I’m sure it’s possible to do, but I couldn’t be bothered because it’d be going against the grain. I like the concept otherwise, especially for a gaming distro. An immutable gaming / HTPC distro with Plsma Bigscreen and no Steam would be the bees knees.
Aurora is what you want. Same family of OS, different flavor. It’s what I use for my PC and my wife’s laptop.
https://getaurora.dev/en/
Thanks, Aurora looks more attractive than Kinoite since it’s more batteries included like Bazzite. As far as Bigscreen, I think that might be possible with rpm-ostree, though my experience with this distro family is limited and not sure how much of a headache that would create.
In general you want to avoid layering packages if possible. But it’s not the end of the world. You can always build your own custom image that updates whenever the base image updates if you need something more customized.