You can try fedora. The workstation if you love GNOME, otherwise the KDE spin.

I run Bazzite on my Desktop now, works great for gaming.

Yes.

They aren’t meant to be “flexible”. Immutable means it’s static, read only. You replace one image with another.

In the case of Silverblue you install using overlays, like Flatpak or toolbox/podman.

With NixOS you do get images, but in the form of clojures. BUT it also handles environments on a fundamental level, so you don’t need to reboot to install new system applications or services.

Have you considered Vanilla OS? There’s also uBlue, but I have hopes for Vanilla because it is user-firsf distro, whereas uBlue is more an off-shoot of Silverblue meant for users, but Ruth and same issues as with Silverblue.

Vanilla 2.0 is coming up soon and it seems like a great alternative for people with little to no know-how, or people who don’t want to mess around and find out.

It’s “inspired” by Nix, but they’re otherwise not related in any way.

(define-public hello
  (package
   (name "hello")
   (version "2.10")
   (source (origin
            (method url-fetch)
            (uri (string-append "mirror://gnu/hello/hello-" version
                                ".tar.gz"))
            (sha256
             (base32
              "0ssi1wpaf7plaswqqjwigppsg5fyh99vdlb9kzl7c9lng89ndq1i"))))
   (build-system gnu-build-system)
   (synopsis "Hello, GNU world: An example GNU package")
   (description
    "GNU Hello prints the message \"Hello, world!\" and then exits.  It
 serves as an example of standard GNU coding practices.  As such, it supports
 command-line arguments, multiple languages, and so on.")
   (home-page "https://www.gnu.org/software/hello/")
   (license gpl3+)))

{ callPackage
, lib
, stdenv
, fetchurl
, nixos
, testers
, hello
}:

stdenv.mkDerivation (finalAttrs: {
  pname = "hello";
  version = "2.12.1";

  src = fetchurl {
    url = "mirror://gnu/hello/hello-${finalAttrs.version}.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "sha256-jZkUKv2SV28wsM18tCqNxoCZmLxdYH2Idh9RLibH2yA=";
  };

[...]

  meta = with lib; {
    description = "A program that produces a familiar, friendly greeting";
    longDescription = ''
      GNU Hello is a program that prints "Hello, world!" when you run it.
      It is fully customizable.
    '';
    homepage = "https://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/";
    changelog = "https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hello.git/plain/NEWS?h=v${finalAttrs.version}";
    license = licenses.gpl3Plus;
    maintainers = [ maintainers.eelco ];
    mainProgram = "hello"; 
    platforms = platforms.all;
  };
})

regular fedora isn’t bad, but I find that silverblue kept getting in my way when in trying to do things. I’m not the biggest fan of regular Fedora don’t get me wrong. but it does a lot of things right.

but well in the end I’m just not the biggest fan of any computer system. I just find arch the most tolerable for not getting in my way. I’m actually really looking forward to trying nixOS since I heard it has a lot of flexibility.

It kinda is. Most of the package maintainers are Red Hat or IBM employees. Red Hat has special roles in the governance structure which no other organisation has. Red Hat provides pretty much all the technical infrastructure (web hosting, repositories, build servers etc.) to the project gratis. Red Hat even own the trademarks to the Fedora name and logo.

The community governance structure is real and good, but it’s denying reality to pretend that Fedora isn’t tightly bound to Red Hat.

Correction, a small country and a kitchen appliciance of your choice

😂 😂 😂 😂 clearly have not worked a day in your life with immutable MIPS devices. If you did I believe your comment would be able to power half of the planet then.

I believe this answers it in detail: lemmy.world/comment/4574094

the article is very well written and effectively debunks a lot of misconceptions however those distros are still an unnecessary extra step that don’t provide a sufficient gain / improvement over “mutable” distributions and/or properly done setups. (…) it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian

Yes I did, the article is very well written and effectively debunks a lot of misconceptions however those distros are still an unnecessary extra step that don’t provide a sufficient gain / improvement over “mutable” distributions and/or properly done setups.

“just different” is by definition “more complicated” as most people going on the “immutable” hype will have to change entire workflows and tech stacks to end up gaining nothing. Moreover immutable distributions (or the majority / most popular of them) will simply add a ton of extra engineering hours and you can’t debug/fix things as quickly as you would otherwise will.

As the article said security isn’t even a valid argument for immutable distros and I’ll give you even more reasons. Properly done setups run on container technologies that allow for a more decent way of immutability - typically snapshots. If you’re going bare metal then use ZFS / BTRFS instead of the Ext4 crap and will also be provided you with that. Snapshots can be easily made automatically on schedule, manually, moved between systems etc. and won’t get in the way of your developers.

Also, the underlying technologies (like OSTree, nix-config, A/B-Root, and so on) aren’t proprietary

True, but this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.

As with CentOS’s fiasco or Docker it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.

We had good examples of immutable distributions and architectures before as any MIPS router and/or IOT device is usually immutable and there are also reasons why people are moving away from those towards more mutable ARM architectures.

We should be exited what the future brings!

We don’t need to see the future to understand what immutable OSes bring to the table - we just have to look at the shit show that was made around MIPS.

Android isn’t that “cut and dry tho” they can unlock the partition.

Overly complicated and burdensome. I just use distrobox for anything that is going to pull in a bunch of dependencies