Finally got tired of my Windows 11 install, and I considered a Linux move. For years and years, I tried to move over, even all the way back in the Ubuntu 16.04 days, even daily drove for a few months, but there would always be something that would make me move back (including but not limited to HDR, support for my old iPod, Outlook calendars, so on). However, on my most recent attempt (running Arch and KDE) things just… work? Yeah, some command line trickery is needed for stuff like HDR gaming (and turns out the screenshots work now, they just get downsampled to SDR by Steam), but this works so so much better than my previous attempts to move over. In recent years, the experience is just so much more polished than it used to be. The situation is no longer “that won’t work”, it is “you can do that, with some minor tweaks”. All my Steam games work nearly perfectly, with only a few changes like Proton GE needed. There are now even improvements like how text on my QD-OLED monitor (which is notoriously fuzzy on Windows) is crisp and clear, or how my Xbox controller’s screenshot button works over Bluetooth on Steam unlike Windows which ignores the button entirely over Bluetooth. Things are really looking up!
Just FYI: While Arch isn’t “For experienced users only”, it still might require some more work after your install.
It usually comes pretty minimal by default, and then you might wonder why printing doesn’t work out of the box for example.
It also makes the inexperienced user very easy to bork the system, and then you have to fix it.
I often hear from other users, that sometimes, this just happens out of the blue too.
If Arch works perfectly for you, then congratulations! Keep using it.
But if you notice, that you have to fight against the OS too often, consider a different distro that is supposed to just work.
One of those might be Bazzite (if you game) or Aurora. Both are almost the same, but Bazzite is more for gaming, while Aurora is more for general, non-gaming use. But you can use them interchangeably.
They belong to the uBlue project, which is a customized Fedora Atomic.
They are already set up for you with everything you want and need, are zero-maintenence and basically indestructible.
So, if you’re done with Arch, consider them.
Arch is to complicated
proceeds to recommend immutable distros
Image based distros are only complicated if you come from traditional distros, because they’re different.
If you come from Windows or another OS, then having “The whole OS is one thing” instead of “A huge collection of packages and directories” makes everything simpler to understand, because you don’t mess with anything except /home/. You don’t have to care about anything else.
And if you want to do something more fancy, like using a CLI tool, then having to enter a Distrobox container isn’t complicated.
For casual use, like gaming, browsing or image editing, everything is just as usual. Nobody, except us Linux nerds, actually cares about the underlying system. Casual users just want the OS to be a tool for their programs they use, and for that, it’s ideal, because it just works and doesn’t bork itself.
Until something goes wrong or they want to customize the system. It will backfire quickly.
Then you can always rollback in case you don’t have a working image.
I had to do that once. On a non-atomic install, this would have meant a completely broken system. In my case, this was one reboot away and it worked again.
And in case you don’t like the direction of your image project going, you can also always rebase to another one in less than 5 minutes, download time and reboot included.
uBlue for example starts with a very basic Fedora Silverblue image, which you can fork easily yourself. I have zero experience in coding or other stuff, and even I managed to get my own custom image working.
There are already a couple of people around who started with Aurora, Secureblue or Bazzite, but then found them too opinionated, and went back to Vanilla Kinoite for example.
It’s extremely simple to switch out the base OS to something almost completely different.
And, you don’t loose any customisability. You can still do everything you want, take a look at Bazzite or Secureblue. Completely different kernel, additional modifications and packages, and much much more. Feels completely different than Vanilla Kinoite for example.
To be fair, the best standard would be to send off new users to immutable distros
Maybe sometime in the future. However, not today. It is still complex and requires some knowledge of how file systems work
True if they are somewhat technical to search for solutions on their own. If they just use web browser then there is bothing to worry about
They will find answers that won’t work as the core system hasn’t changed much over the last 20 years.
What does this mean?
I tried using Bazzite since I didn’t want to fuss with Wayland on Nvidia with Arch.
I had more gripes and more issues with an immutable distro than I ever did with my Arch install.
Stuck it out with Arch. It has taught me a lot.
The problem many folks have with Arch is the fact they don’t want to read or learn; well, newsflash, if you read and learn Arch isn’t exactly all that hard to use, setup, or maintain. It has better documentation than Bazzite and other newer distros. In fact, Arch Wiki has saved me hassle for other distros.
Your mileage may vary. However, I wouldn’t recommend an immutable distribution nec3ssarily to someone coming from Windows unless they want to shift from one paradigm to another.
Switching from Windows to something with such a vastly different approach in many cases will turn users away from using Linux. Their experience can dictate they switch away because of lack of knowledge and then proced to conflate every distro as just one “Linux” experience and not want to look back at it.
I still stand by one thing you will always hear me say: use the right tool for the job.
Honestly, I just use Kubuntu. It just works, out of the box, with no fuckery involved and I can customize it as I want. You can read more about what I think about immutable distros in my blog post
(In reply to the post) Actually, I’ve found my immutable distro of choice (Silverblue) to be a lot of fun to tinker in (not with), but you just have to accept that tinkering does work a bit different here, with toolbox/containers instead of your actual host system to install most stuff you want to try etc. on
While your blogpost isn’t completely right, it’s also not completely wrong.
You can absolutely customize image based distros, just as much as package manager based ones. You just need to do it from upstream, to modify the image itself, not from bottom-up like usually.
uBlue is the best example. There are already hundreds of available customized images around, including for Hyprland, Deepin, and much more.
That’s why immutable is often considered the wrong term for it. Image based, or atomic, is way better fitting.
One of the biggest pros, apart from the lack of maintenance needed (updating, etc.) is the reproducibility.
It’s very similar to Android, where every phone is the same.
Therefore, every bug is the same too, which is why the devs can roll out patches that fix everyone’s install at once.
Also, every update is basically a “reinstall lite”, so no package drift occours.
This makes them way less buggy in my experience.
I used the normal Fedora KDE spin for example, and after a few months there often came weird bugs that only affected my install.
Since the time I use Atomic, none of those problems came back.
Even if you decide to utilize BTRFS-snapper, which you suggested, the underlying system drifts apart from the original install.
Also, instead of Kubuntu, I would recommend the Fedora KDE spin or just Debian with KDE, if you really want to use something traditional.
I just don’t see any reason to not run Kinoite compared to a non-atomic distro, and it will only get better in the future.
Honestly, I use X, Y and Z
It works out of the box (basically everyone here)
This is by far the most confusing part when I consider switching over - which one to get? Primarily Steam gaming, but I saw someone mention the Nvidia cards I have might not play nice.
It’s the same process as when buying a car. Try a few out and see which one you like.
If you aren’t trying to run anything too crazy (like AMD HIP compute, HDR, really bleeding edge hardware) I would probably recommend giving openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora (only the regular GNOME version, for some reason KDE spin was buggy in my experience), and Pop OS a test drive off live USB drives. Each has their own merits, so it’s worth trying all of them. In terms of NVIDIA support, I personally do not have much experience with NVIDIA cards, but when I was helping a friend format an iPod Fedora booted off a live USB on an RTX 4050 laptop with little fuss, and if you install it gives options for installing the full proprietary NVIDIA drivers. I know there is also an NVIDIA installer option in YaST’s software manager for openSUSE, and Pop even has an ISO with the drivers baked right in for full compatibility. However, your mileage may vary, although I have heard the whole NVIDIA situation is pretty good right now as long as you have the proprietary drivers installed.