Im wondering if there are any other immutable gamine distros besides bazzite. in particular im wondering if immutables use any other base. I swear I thought suse was doing custome type things long ago.
Im wondering if there are any other immutable gamine distros besides bazzite. in particular im wondering if immutables use any other base. I swear I thought suse was doing custome type things long ago.
Other than Fedora Atomic derivatives (like Bazzite) and of course SteamOS, the only big one I can think of is NixOS? It’s certainly not tailored to gaming, but it does look like 2.4% of ProtonDB users run it
is nixos immutable?
I game on NixOS, ask me anything and I’ll do my best to answer :)
To answer if NixOS is immutable, kind of yes if you want it to be immutable.
It can really be whatever you want it to be. If you:
Your system is pinned and reproducible.
Applying the same config on any other system would result in the exact same setup. All around.
When you want to update, you update the inputs to your flake, rebuild your system and switch into the new build.
If everything is good, you commit the updated flake file and any other system can pull it to update to the exact same config state.
It is magic and cool!
Also, if you want, it can be the complete opposite.
You can switch from the stable channels (new releases bi-annually) to the unstable channel (rolling release) and configure auto-updates.
Now you have a bleeding edge system that updates daily.
It is so cool.
I get that there is a lot of terms and stuff that is unclear, but it’ll all clear up once you get into it :)
But yeah, it is a OS that revolves around config files and kind of “coding” your own system.
If that sounds like fun to you (I love it) give it a try! If that sounds daunting, maybe stick with Bazzite, CachyOS or something easy to use. NixOS is easy to work with once you get it, but so is rocket science I guess.
I am rambling. Give it a try! Or don’t! 😄
I am going to migrate our living room gaming PC, my Raspberry Pi and my server machine to NixOS once I get the chance to.
This is my Linux endgame. I am not going back from here 😄
NixOS is not really a distro like other distros. It is more like a framework of creating the perfect custom distro that fits YOU.
If you’ve read this far, you’re a champ 🙏
I imagine that this also means it’s your own responsibility to research and manage upgrades that the rest of the Linux world are making. For example, X11 -> Wayland, PulseAudio -> Pipewire. One of the benefits of using distros like Fedora or Debian is that you can trust them to make these changes for you. Reproducible is nice, but immutable distros give you a reproducible desktop that also evolves over time, without any effort from you.
Yeah, you have to define this stuff somewhere. But changing from one to another is simple.
This is my audio setup right now:
services.pulseaudio.enable = false; services.pipewire = { enable = true; alsa.enable = true; alsa.support32Bit = true; pulse.enable = true; };I will just keep rolling this until it constrains me somehow and then I will revisit it and improve it to fit my needs.
If you like NixOS, this is not a big burden really. Otherwise you are probably better off with some other dist, as you mentioned.
I don’t see it as a big tradeoff, but that’s because I like this way of doing things.
All the power to you! For me personally, what I’ve learned in the past few years of using Linux, is that installing things is just half the battle. The other half is discovering them and deciding whether they are worth the time and effort. And I found out about so many useful tools from the Fedora and Bazzite teams that I decided I’d rather let them make the choices for me. Things like pipewire, wayland, fzf, ptyxis, btrfs, podman, distrobox, bazaar, and so much more.
When I want to configure a declarative environment like people do on Nixos, I just use a container, devpod, or distrobox. These are all included on Bazzite DX. But for the base system I prefer to delegate trust to others to save me the time and energy. The maintainers test each tool, and make sure they are stable and work with the rest of the system, so that I don’t have to. And in the future if I decide I don’t like the direction that Bazzite is going, the rpm-ostree rebase system lets me use a single command to switch to a different distro maintained by a different team.
Though to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nixos had a similar system, and if they don’t right now they probably will in the future. Things are changing fast!
I absolutely love the idea of NixOS and have tried it a few times, but I just can’t wrap my head around the language and syntax. It hurts my brain. Which is sad for me, because it seems like magic until I run into a wall and it starts doing unexpected things and I go into the slippery slope of messy confusing code trying to patch things until it works the way I want it to and I soon have a unmaintainable spaghetti configuration I can no longer understand at all and I never escape the doomspiral.
Yeah, it took me a good while to be comfortable. And I am still more or less a noob.
I’d say I don’t fully understand the syntax properly, but I get around. The docs are great if you haven’t checked them.
I have also been spitballing with AI to get input on how to attack new problems in there and I find that really helpful. If you are strongly anti-ai there are some good community chats on Discord, Matrix and elsewhere where people have been really kind and helpful as well.
My recommendation is:
You have to think it is fun for it to be worth it really, but you seem sold on the concept, so I think you’ll get there!
its kinda funny because something like this is why I liked puppy awhile back.
Or is the quintessential immutability.
Yes.
It’s also a completely different way to handle … everything.
Do not think about nixos if you want to know what to try for gaming.
Do look at it id you want to learn the ins and outs of … Well, to be honest nixos. But I’ve learned a lot about standard paths that everyone expects to be there and hell’s loose if they aren’t.
Python runs amok if it can’t write into it’s beloved lib folders, nginx is utterly confused why it can’t generate certificates on startup (read only folders), deployment dependencies are absolutely visible - and if you fick up the whole system just goes “nah, take a step back and think about what you just did”.
I’m now pushing two years on my server and I’m still not sure if I’d recommend it - but I for sure enjoy it!
honestly im just not sure about red hat long term so was looking for alternatives but at the same time want to be able to play games pretty lazily.
Not sure what you aren’t sure about, but Fedora isn’t made by Red Hat. It’s the other way around. Red Hat takes Fedora as a base to make RHEL.
But Fedora is maintained by its community, not the company.
it can be if you want it to be. I will say though, while I do love NixOS and it’s my favourite distro, might be a bit of overkill if you just want something to game on. That said it can be done easily.
you can pretty much tailor it to however you want it. configure it how you want, however you want. Hell you could run the distro without installing anything if you so wished and still be able to game.