I’ve got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I’ve been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while… I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.

Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?

Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn’t a favorite these days though).

  • throwaway403@programming.dev
    61·
    4 hours ago

    While the landscape of ‘atomic’ distros may look thriving, we can distill the amount of mature projects to just NixOS, Guix System and Fedora Atomic (and their derivatives).

    Most of the other projects found e.g. here are unfortunately not worth your time in most cases.

    As for which one to go with, that definitely depends on what you desire out of it (in alphabetical order):

    • Do you want something that’s relatively easy to start out with? Then go with Fedora Atomic (or a derivative[1]). From my personal testing, this one also seems to be the friendliest in terms of taking away many footguns.
    • If two of the following strike a chord with ya, then you should heavily consider Guix Systems:
      • Enjoying/liking[2] Lisp
      • Being passionate about F(L)OSS
      • Enjoying NixOS as a model, but being discontent with something[3] that happens to be (better) (re)solved on Guix Systems
    • NixOS is the OG[4]. As such, there’s a lot of cruft. But within that mess, somehow, ironically, it holds the potential for setting up the cleanest OS. As you can guess, without a shred of doubt, it is the most mature and most powerful out of the bunch. So, if you’ve got exotic places you’d like to go with your distro, then -in a lot of cases- this is the only viable destination.

    1. The images found under the umbrella of uBlue (which includes Bluefin) are even easier. ↩︎

    2. Or, at least finding it intriguing. ↩︎

    3. Including, but not limited to, Documentation; DSL vs actual programming language; project governance. ↩︎

    4. To be clear, it’s almost as old as Ubuntu. ↩︎