If you don’t like Gnome, use Aurora (the sister distro of Bluefin and Bazzite).

I used to play around with Aeon (built from opensuse). But it’s locked to Gnome only. I’d stick with Aurora or Bazzite instead.

All distros are immutable if you lost your root password.

I think NixOS is the way to go currently, but I personally would not use it due to the extra amount of work for little to no benefit on a single-user home machine.

I run NixOS as a daily driver and on a box for docker containers. I will say that it is stable to point that since nothing seems to ever really break, I don’t feel I really understand the configuration as well as I could (since I’m not having to fix things and learn).

I started with just traditional NixOS but later moved to using flakes. Because of flakes input pinning, it’s much more reproducible but also even more stable. The biggest benefit I see to flakes is the use of local git for updating. Since I have git logs for auditing, if something were to go wrong, I’d just find that change in log and revert to before that commit hash (or just revert to different generation).

The biggest problem I’ve had is how procedurally some tasks change and sometimes are made more difficult. Symlinks is a good example of that. In Arch, symlinking is just a basic one-liner. In NixOS, it’s a matter of writing config more verbosely to the configuration.nix file :

(pkgs.writeTextFile {
  	name = "tst";
  	destination = "/bin/tst";
  	executable = true;
  	text = builtins.readFile ./scripts/tst;
}) 

That’s a good takeaway from NixOS: things are more verbose in setup, but tend to get set once and never again.

I run Silverblue on 2 devices (my main computer and laptop) for half a year. It works and I didn’t have any major issues with it. Though as you might have experienced with other immutable distros, some things like configuring gdm might be a bit more work. But for most things there is a flatpak. The only software that couldn’t be installed that wat was my vpn.

If you want to try out something new, NixOS or Guix might be more up your alley

The only immutable distro I’ve tried is Bazzite. It’s gaming-oriented, but can work well as a desktop. It also does offer a KDE edition, but for some reason they intentionally ship with some GNOME programs instead of the KDE ones. For example, a fresh KDE edition installation includes Ptyxis instead of Konsole.

Also, DistroWatch’s search has the option to only show immutable distros. It’s under the Distribution Category option. I figure that might help you find a few more options.

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.

Maybe Fedora Silverblue? Bluefin is built on top of Fedora anyways. You will find more support online for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite over Bluefin.

I know Bazzite over Silverblue/Kinoite can make sense so that you can have RPM steam and also not deal with the Nvidia driver hassle on immutable distros, but the advantages of using Bluefin is a bit unclear.

Side question: you bought a laptop but don’t know what specs it has? How did that happen?

I’m a big proponen5 of bazzite. Been daily driving it on my laptop for well over a year (check my post history for details). Never needed to go into the command line to fix anything, never needed to worry about drivers. Basically as stable as windows (not now since windows actually is unstable with their vibe coded updates).