What are the pros and cons of the different immutable distros?
What are the pros and cons of the different immutable distros?
What are the pros and cons of the different immutable distros?
This is just my not-at-all-in-depth summary based on playing around with a few in VMs, but as a non-power-user:
Fedora Silverblue
Pros: Good support/documentation
Cons: barebones Gnome/required layering quite a few packages if you want any kind of customization before I could get my system up and running
OpenSUSE Aeon (MicroOS)
Pros: good number of built-in tools (e.g. Tweaks, distrobox)
Cons: documentation is sorely lacking
Vanilla OS
Pros: great ease of use/installation, container-centric
Cons: still very much a work in progress/small dev team
It's also worth mentioning Universal Blue which is based on Fedora Silverblue but has multiple variants with additional doftware. It seems like you can rebase an existing Silverblue system to it and also switch back without reinstallation.
The cons for Silverblue aren't really fair, you can customize the GNOME desktop at will installing Extension Manager from Flathub, and a lot of CLI tools you'd layer you can get working through toolbx/distrobox, and barebones GNOME is literally the same as stock Fedora.
The cons for Silverblue aren’t really fair
The customizing one most definitely isn't. As straight out of the box you can go to extensions.gnome.org and add all the extensions you want.
Now the big problem is the codecs, those have to be layered for proper vaapi/vdpau support. Then I had to layer a different kernel (Surface Pro), and different power management (tlp, since power profiles daemon gives terrible battery life).
While it's a con that I have to do this, it's also a pro that I'm able to do this where many of the other immutable distros don't allow this.
Yeah, I didn't really explain myself very well, in retrospect
Like Fedora Workstation, there were quite a few packages that I needed to add after the initial installation - Gnome Tweaks, RPMFusion, Flathub, third party codecs, etc.
Silverblue being immutable made this process more of headache than I felt it should have been.
It’s been discussed on Hacker news recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37551474
I can only speak for Silverblue, as I didn't try other ones yet. But I'm extremely happy with it.
Fedora delivers with Sway and Budgie as well now, in addition to Gnome and KDE
Nixos
Pros
Cons
Poor documentation combined with the step learning curve is quite a problem imho.
This is what ultimately repelled me. I've installed it for a couple weeks, and while I appreciate what it's trying to do, the learning curve was not worth the effort. At least not yet
Flakes aren't really unstable, but a lot of documentation is based on the old way of doing things. Also, Nix(OS) has a steep learning curve.
To enable the use of flakes, you have to use the 'extra-expiremental-features flakes' flag.
Edit: Apparently they are called 'extra-expiremental-features' not 'extra-unstable-features'. Regardless the nix docs explicitly describe them as unstable here
https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/contributing/experimental-features.html