Sup penguin people.
I’ve been running various flavours and variations of Ubuntu for a while. I find I have to nuke and reset my laptop every 6ish months because things eventually stop working or I get weird bugs.
Recently I’ve been having this on and off problem where the computer just shows a black screen after turning it on. The only way to fix this is to tap keys repeatedly until a console shows up and it seems to kick the computer into gear and log in. Other times I have to restart 2-3 times before it logs me in.
I’ve had a lot of small issues like that (like having to jiggle the volume knob in the sound mixer to get sound working) and I’m wondering if switching to an immutable distro (like bazzite) would solve this apparent config creep.
I have a Steamdeck and it’s been solid and stable ever since I got it. I know it’s running an immutable distro and after researching a little bit it sounds like they can be more stable.
I’m no power user but I play some steam games and run a local 7b LLM and like to have a virtual machine or two for Windows XP emulation for some retro gaming.
Anyone have any opinions? What are your thoughts on immutable distros (like Bazzite)? Pros? Cons? Success/doom stories?
Edit: I’m back baby. 4 months later and still kicking it with Bazzite. Go immutable if you’re a former windows person and needs a computer to just work the way you’d expect without any configuration. I’m running all my steam games and plugging into my usb c dock for mouse keyboard webcam and 2 1080p monitor. I could never get that working on other distros. The future is immutable 🙌
2 year update edit: still on the same install! I managed to fuck up the system fonts without being able to fix them so I made a new user and that fixed everything. Immutable JUST WORKS.
I’ve been using Silverblue and Universal Blue’s images for at least a couple of years now and although there were a couple of rare instances I had to manually intervene with my system due to issues, the experience is considerably better than a traditional distro.
Same, I’ve switched all of my workstations to Kinoite and Silverblue over the past 18 months, and couldn’t be much happier about it.
I used Ubuntu for a long while, then Debian for a new PC because the video card or display just wasn’t working on Ubuntu.
Couple of weeks ago I finally tried this distro hopping thing people have been on about. I’d stuck with Ubuntu for so long due to an apparently misguided belief that it was stable.
I’m now using Project Bluefin from Universal Blue, a derivative of Fedora Silverblue and I’m blown away by how good it is. It uses Gnome and the maintainer has packaged a few tweaks to keep it similar in user experience to Ubuntu, along with a fantastic array of great software I never knew existed.
I’d highly recommend it to anyone historically loyal to Debian or Ubuntu.
For gaming you can easily install Bazzite as a container to access Steam. I can’t say I fully follow the tech stack that makes it work, but it just does. Whereas my boilerplate Steam install on Debian was completely botched.
Universal Blue really is the future…
Has been working for me. The issues I’ve encountered so far are all minor flatpak issues (Firefox not allowed to sleep-lock so the laptop screen shuts off watching videos etc)
You could use some sort of caffeine as a workaround. I do since sleep locks don’t always work.
Kde has a disable sleep button in the power/battery icon menu which I use as a work around, still annoying and yet another quality of life issue that Just Works ™ on other platforms
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IMHO you should first figure out what exactly happens/goes wrong with your Ubuntu installations.
Immutable distros might or might not be a solution, but if the core of the problem is really the quality of the Ubuntu updates for example, you could try to run Debian (stable).
But again, the suggestion to use Debian is throwing a solution in the room which might not fit your problem.
Just as a reference point: I am running Debian stable on Laptops, Netbooks, Raspberry Pis and in virtual machines (AMD64/AArch64) and have no weird bugs, everything works for years now and runs smooth.
Concerning the Steamdeck… I love them, they run perfectly fine, but unless you are tweaking them/do more than run games, you cannot really compare them to what happens on your desktop.
I basically treat this laptop as I would a bigger steamdeck. I video edit, play games, and browse the internet. That’s basically 99% of my use case
It sounds really strange, that you end up with the problems you described given your usage.
My systems are heavily modified/tweaked, so one would expect I would experience the problems you describe.
Given your usage, using an immutable distro sounds like a no-brainer to me, immutable Linux was created with your usage scenarios in mind.
In your shoes I would still try to pin point the root cause of the error, because in theory™ your usage should not be a problem for any of the mainstream Linux distros and we don’t know if an immutable distro solves your trouble.
Given your 6 montish circle it sounds like some kind of accumulation? If the computer runs stable for several month, IMHO you can rule out hardware problems, unless you have a kernel update every 6 months… :-P
Can you be more specific about your hardware, laptop model and Ubuntu version you are using?
If you ever figure out what happened, or if you try out an immutable distro and it runs for a year for you, give us an update! :-)
Right? I’ve had these issues with a Framework 13 AMD and have experienced these problems on Kubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu 22.04, and Kubuntu 24.04.
Otherwise the computer runs stably albeit certain flatpaks and snaps just stop working for some reason over time (like BambuStudio and Webcord and a Notion web wrapper and Kdenlive).
Ignore everyone here saying fix Ubuntu and try Fedora Kinoite (or Silverblue). Bazzite is probably great too if you are gaming but I haven’t tried it.
I finally tried Fedora Kinoite after years of Ubuntu (and related distros) and I genuinely wish I had tried it sooner. Everything just works. I cannot reccomend it enough. It’s what I always wanted Linux to be.
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Echoing the other sentiments, it’s probably a good idea to hunt down why your system is having trouble because distro hopping might not fix it.
That being said I’ve recently been using bazzite and it’s been relatively smooth. You just have to learn a couple (easy) ways to do package management a little differently.
How is package management different on Bazzite?
I’m not the one you posed your question towards, but it’s related to Bazzite’s relation to Fedora Atomic and uBlue.
To put it simply,
dnfis the ‘source of truth’ when it comes to package management (i.e. finding, installing, updating, removing (etc) of packages) on (traditional/regular) Fedora. So,dnfis basically to Fedora whataptused to be to Ubuntu. Sure, you can use Flatpak or any other (additional) package manager. But, there’s no need to unless the software you seek is not available for installation throughdnf.Bazzite, on the other hand, does not allow you to install any packages through
dnf. Instead,rpm-ostree,flatpak, Toolbx/Distrobox and (exclusive to uBlue projects)brew(andujust) are provided by default. But, you might have to learn when you’d have to use which and why.To educate yourself on this, you should definitely consider reading up on the related entry within Bazzite’s documentation. In general, there’s a lot of very useful stuff in Bazzite’s documentation. Therefore, if you intend to use Bazzite, you should definitely read through its documentation.
Ah gotcha okay. Probably explains why sudo dnf update/upgrade wasn’t quite doing what I expected in my Bazzite install. Force of habit since I’ve used Fedora and Debian based systems in the past.
Probably explains why sudo dnf update/upgrade wasn’t quite doing what I expected in my Bazzite install.
Exactly.
Force of habit since I’ve used Fedora and Debian based systems in the past.
Understandable.
I had an yearly experience with Nix, but I’m thinking that it is overhead for just a home PC system. You may have more pain with static linkage compared to benefits of Nix reproducability and flexibility. Now is a year I’m on the Fedora Silverblue and this one is a really good balance between complexity and usability.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by “pain with static linkage”? If my links have broken in NixOS, it was always due to my inability / laziness to set things up correctly.
I have been using NixOS for my daily driver for about a year now, and while it has been a bit of a learning curve to set things up and heavily rewrite my dotfiles, the dependability and availability of packages has been nothing short of amazing. It feels a lot like the final destination for my distro hopping journey.
I use a lot of CLI tools and some system level hackage to get my keybindings just right, so when I tried out Silverblue I had to load in a lot of stuff through rpm-ostree, which was less than ideal. But if OP wants a rock solid system with Flatpak apps, I wholeheartedly second Silverblue.
I mean if you try to use anything like python packages or even try to build python from sources it is painful. The only way to create developer environment is to use something like
nex developshells and you need to care about passing to LD_LIBRARY_PATH all that you need. And nothing downloaded as a binary is not working… For example, if I’m working on a Java-maven project that includes maven-protobuf then it is not working for you because protoc binary formanylinuxis made for a dynamic linkage… Overall developer experience is painful. And anything that is not in nixpkgs you cannot just download, build from source and use: you need to pack everything into packages with resolving all the dependencies by hands…Thanks for clarifying! I can totally see where that sort of stuff can really mess things up.
My experience with development environments has been a bit better: Node works out of the box, no problem. For Ruby, the workflow took a little setting up (with bundix), but ended up working very reliably. For R, I actually enjoy that I can set up all my packages with home-manager and they get updated in my regular update cycle and it’s not a separate process altogether.
Vanilla OS 2.0 looks promising in my opinion. But it’s not out yet unfortunately. It’s an immutable distro that has integrated containers for all the main Linux distros. You can for example install Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch stuff on the same machine.
Do you mean that there are integrated virtual machines?
Yeah kinda. A container has a lot better performance than a virtual machine and can interact with your system
What a roller coaster!
Immutable forever.
I recommend that you transition instead of switching. That way you have a way to roll back If the distro you are trying out proves not to be what you expected.
I share the exact same experience with you.
I use the ublue kinoite-main base image, not one of their very opinionated variants. It is best as a base, better than Fedoras (even though you need to trust Github 100%)
config creep is solved only partly. I am currently overhauling the kind-of guide here
Local stuff in your home is persistent, and /etc is also persistent.
But we are working on that.
Bazzite has a ton of WINE stuff on the system, not really the “immutable small core” principle. At the same time they uninstall Firefox, while Flatpak Firefox does not support all things.
So I recommend to install Fedora Kinoite from the official website and follow the rebase guideline here at the bottom
I have experienced an issue sort of like that in the past, where my computer occasionally won’t do anything other than spin the fans, unless there’s a working connection to a monitor…
Bro,
I have a suggestion.
Stop changing every config and maybe your system won’t bork every 6 months?
Happy that immutable helped limit your angst for breaking your own system, but that fact that you had to redo the user indicates that you tried breaking it, again.
No need to change but, maybe please check what you run on the command line or change on the UI and stuff?
For context, I run endeavourOS(arch) and update maybe once every 2-4 weeks. I run steam, I have no weird config modified, I just run some games, use discord where screen share just works, all my PC ports work as they should, and things basically just work. I do take care of uninstalling things I installed outside of the official pipeline, ofc, maybe that was your issue.
In your defense, I also did break my system several times ages ago, with Ubuntu and stuff, when I didn’t know things well enough and I was overconfident, running things I didn’t properly understand. The trick has been to just persevere and understand every change and fix stuff.
Bro,
I have a suggestion.
Consider what added value your comments bring to posts (especially 2-year old dead posts on niche social media platforms).
You’ve misinterpreted what actually was said in the post, you’ve concocted a scenario that isn’t even possible (me blindly pasting random code into the terminal of an immutable distro and then messing up the config), and then mentioned how you use Arch (btw).
The stereotype of Arch users is meant to be a meme. You don’t need to take it seriously. I’ll paste some random code I find online into my terminal now for your sake and I’ll pray for you.
