alt Hacker NewsI’ve been using it for a couple of months on my main dev machine (I don’t game much). It’s my first exposure to immutable systems.
I love the idea, but honestly, juggling all these package managers gets annoying really fast; for now what I use is rpm-ostree (which you really shouldn’t touch unless you absolutely have to), Flatpak, Homebrew (some package are mac only or mac first), and distrobox (with arch).
Every now and then I think of going back to arch cause they are the only distro that made it very convenient to install some obscure packages that is only used by handful of people
Like yesterday, I tried setting up Flutter with the Android SDK command-line tools and the rest of the Android dev stack, and it took me almost 2 hours to get everything working; On Arch? That’s just a few packages, all sitting right there in the main repo or the AUR.
Replies
I tried out Fedora Silverblue a while ago but found immutable OSs to be too inconvenient for development right now. I don’t think it’s an inherent flaw in the design, just all the dev tools are not set up to work with them.
For normal non dev usage it works great. On my steam deck I just get everything through Flatpak or steam and it just works.
I get what your saying, but it's just a matter of finding the right workflow.
I'm very much like you infact, so I ended up resorting to just using an Arch Distrobox for pretty much everything. I leave rpm-ostree and Flatpaks alone as far as possible, so I only really have to worry about my Arch for updates and everything else takes care of itself.
You may ask then why not just use Arch? Well of course you can, but I like the idea of having a rock solid base where I know for a fact that I can let it happily update without breaking something. Arch still requires manual intervention every now and then (such as package migrations or some dependency conflicts). Not a big deal if you keep up with the Arch News and Discord announcements etc, but sometimes IRL gets in the way and I'm not up-to-speed with what's happening. With my Bazzite+Arch setup, I'm not super bothered with this, plus it's easy to blow my whole container and set it up again, and in fact I've got a bash script to do just that on one of my other PCs that I don't use regularly (because Arch needs to be updated regularly, otherwise you're in for a nasty surprise when you find out your keyring is out-of-date and pacman has been upgraded and nothing works... with a container, just blow it up and fetch the latest version, reinstall your packages and you're up and running in no time).