I’m considering trying out an immutable distro after using Tumbleweed for the last 6 years.
The two major options for me seem to be Fedora Kinoite or uBlue Aurora-dx
My understanding is that universal-blue is a downstream of Fedora Atomic
So, the points in favor of Kinoite is sticking closer to upstream, however it seems like I would need to layer quite a few packages. My understanding is that this is discouraged in an rpm-ostree setup, particularly due to update time and possible mismatches with RPMFusion
uBlue Aurora-dx seems to include a lot of the additional support I’d need - ROCm, distrobox, virt-manager, libratbag, media codecs, etc. however I’m unclear how mature the project is and whether it will be updated in a timely manner long term
I’m curious what the community thinks between the two as a viable option
It’s not only discouraged but often times it’s system breaking. I used Kinoite for a year before I just became too frustrated and gave up. The first thing I learned though was to stay away from package layering because it tended to break things more often than not. Basically if you can’t find or build a flatpak and you don’t want to use toolbox all the time, just stick with workstation. Immutable is great when deploying to multiple servers or locked-down corporate workstations, but it makes no sense for your personal setup especially if you’re already familiar with Linux.
deleted by creator
That’s great for you. Not everyone may use their distro in the same way as you.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/is-silverblue-rpm-ostree-intended-to-be-used-with-layered-packages/26162/2 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-silverblue-36-will-not-succesfully-deploy-after-layering-packages/77502/3 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/991 https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/4280
Not to mention the whole Firefox debacle of including an outdated borked version based with the system install instead of just moving to Flatpak install of most recent stable release. There’s a very valid reason why package layering is discouraged by atomic maintainers and why toolbox is there by default as part of OS. And don’t even get me started on DKMS and driver installation.
My experience with DKMS is that it is fucked on every distro. I was using Debian at the time and it somehow broke.