I’ve been feeling gushy about my setup lately, I think I’ve finally found my home on Linux. For decades I’ve distrohopped each year and never was really happy with it all, but Fedora Atomic has changed that.
Some things I can do with Fedora Atomic that I cannot do with other Linux distros:
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I can rebase to Bazzite for gaming performance when I feel like having a long gaming session.
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I can rebase to Secureblue when I think I will not be gaming and would prefer a more secure linux setup.
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I can update my system and not have to worry about special instructions, its extremely stable. Many times in the past, running a small ma-and-pa distro with most things pre-configed for performance would end with it breaking after a couple of major updates. This isn’t true for configs like Bazzite and Secureblue, they are remarkably stable across many major updates due to how rpm-ostree functions.
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Distrobox and Flatpak are more than enough at this stage for most programs and they help you avoid making too many alterations to the base image, greatly speeding up the swaps between major images.
The kicker? Your user configs and home files are never changed when you ‘image hop’. It always feels like you just installed a fresh distro whenever you upgrade, and the performance benefits are noticeable. You don’t have to tinker and do the same changes over and over, its all handled for you by rpm-ostree.
10/10 this is the future of Linux. I hope for a future where I can rebase entire Linux distros while maintaining my configs with one simple command, but for now, Fedora Atomic is fantastic.
The downsides:
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There is one major downside, and its that all of your system files are read-only. Personally, I’ve found a dozen ways to get around this, it requires thinking inside the Distrobox. It is a notable issue for many people, though. This means you cannot make specific tweaks without making a whole new image for yourself. Though in practice, I have found the ecosystem has grown a lot. Other people have already made the best tweaks available for you with only a few simple commands.
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Rpm-ostree also is slow to update because its essentially building a whole git tree to make sure your updates never break and are as stable as possible. You also have to reboot each time you alter it, which can be annoying, but if you stick to flatpaks and distroboxes, this issue is mitigated significantly.
I’ve updated enterprise Linux machines automatically for decades. The score is tens of thousands of upgrades, 1 problem I caused, 1 packaging glitch.
You don’t need to take on risky drek like flatpaks to get there. It’s one command in enterprise and you’re kinda done forever.
Glad you like your setup. I hope it works for you and you never learn the risks of flatpaks.
it’s also supported by Homebrew Package Manager so you can use command line shells outside containers without layering if you want to
I really like it as well. I did three major version upgrades so far and they have been flawless. I also really like Flatpak, finally a way of easily installing something on Linux without breaking half of the system because the application you wanted to install uses libfoo 2.0 and not libfoo 1.9.9-patch-1337. With my atomic desktop applications that worked yesterday also work today. Things don’t randomly break all the time.
The future of Fedora Atomic also looks exciting; Timothée Ravier is working on sysexts which are a way of installing applications without ostree layering. I could remove most of my ostree layered packages with that.
Oooh, didn’t know about that. Very exciting
does an Atomic / Immutable distro use more disk space than say my Arch install? if yes, how much more? if no, I am moving immediately.
It uses more, yeah. But it’s not a lot more. You could maybe compare the iso sizes
I’ve been running bluefin for about a week and I agree. One of the best things about these different distros is they install and configure a lot of things for you. Bluefin installs with flatpak, homebrew, distrobox, podman/docker, devcontainers configured and running on install, good peripheral support, good desktop tweaks, and sensible but easily removable default apps. Bazzite does something similar for gaming installs. It’s great. If there are common apps or configs that their users want they try to implement set up and running on install, if possible. The most friction free linux install I’ve ever had.
I appreciate your mentioning the downside. I am way too much of a tinkerer for a read-only root to be acceptable for me, but I’m glad you found something you like.
Why not just run a hypervisor and use containers?
I have a build like this for tinkering but to say it is slow and inefficient is an understatement. Very secure though. I can’t really see daily driving it.
It’s not the future… it’s the present for all users running mobile linux-based computing devices called Android smartphones. The paradigm is very similar to Atomic distros. As for what the future might hold for linux, that remains to be seen.
The Atomic UX has proven very popular with mainstream users running by Steam Deck and similar devices as running Bazzite. They may not be aware how they are built, they just know it just works and that’s all they need.
As for the maintainers, containerized development removes a lot of development time, provided they have experience in cloud native development environments. Old school developers get annoyed by this constraints.
All in all, it’s just another alternative, don’t diss it out of fear it might take over the Linux scene… let others have what they need, provided by Linux and open source software.
I think i’ll be heading back to Pop!_OS for my main rig. While i like Bazzite, i can’t get VR to function on it, or get my 5.1 surround sound system working.
You might want to look at the ujust commands on Bazzite, they have some options for setting up surround sound and VR I’m quite sure. I have a pretty simple setup personally so I’ve never used those things.
Distrobox and Flatpak are more than enough at this stage for most programs
Maybe for you, but personally I could never get by with only that. I have zero interest in atomic distros. To me they look like an inferior version of NixOS, which I have yet to fully wrap my head around. Until then I’ll stick to Arch (BTW)
Same here. I have and will always periodically reinstall no matter which OS I happen to be using. Arch is the only distro that keeps me coming back because installation and setup is such an active process. Every time around I learn something new and get more effecient at the process, which is so much more rewarding than filling a few boxes and waiting on a progress bar as is the case with most distros I have experienced.
I think it comes down to priorities.
Whenever someone mentions Arch the pro arguments are always something in the lines of “I get to tinker”, “I learn so much reading the documentation”, “We are first in line to receive packages”, “We have packages that no other distro has”.
As someone who uses a laptop for work, all of those things sound like a nightmare. If I were a student with spare time on my hands, maybe I’d value such a distro more.
But as it stands, stability without compromising modern technology (I wouldn’t use a Debian-based x11 distro) and minimal options to tinker with, is my sweet spot. Because I need my laptop to have it’s security updates on time, and just work.
wonder how it is on aarch64, I might try it
10/10 this is the future of Linux.
I hope it’s a future of Linux, not the future. I’m not a fan of atomic distros, mostly because if their reliance on flatpak and the like
Flatpaks are better for security though. Containerization is a necessity for any serious device connecting to the internet.
Linux users got way too confortable giving any obscure package they found on AUR root access to their entire device, lol.
And that’s why it’s good that it’s an option! I just don’t want it to become the only option
Fair. I think for as long as there is a will to maintain traditional distros (which there is), there will be options.
Hell, people are still keeping Thinkpads T480 alive and relatively secure by making custom libre bootloaders! The FOSS community is awesome.
I think this approach is going to fair the best for mainstream adoption (i.e. Windows refugees). So I would agree that the “future” is going to involve immutable distros as a large, possibly majority, of all Linux installations.
Agreed - for someone moving from Windows / Mac, the immutables and flatpak are the way to go now. It’s going to take a bit for the Ubuntu / Mint crowd to change their song. Bazzite in particular is a huge olive branch to the gamers. Even for someone who is “tinkering” learning distrobox and/or flatseal can enable most things you would ever want to tinker with on a desktop. If you are really developing something, chances are that you use containers or a VM anyway.
I have to concur on flatpaks though: they have room for improvement. More validation / trust is needed, and the options are wide open. For non-technical users, the *surety and security *isn’t necessarily on par with the app stores of Microsoft, Apple & Google - though the experience is getting there.
Pros and cons on the app store thing. Microsoft may curate a bit more but I think it’s inherently more dangerous. A malicious Windows app probably doesn’t have as many hurdles to get the necessary access to take over your system or otherwise cause trouble. To my knowledge, flatpaks can’t run with root permissions unless you executed as root (i.e. enter your password). Seeing that pop up should be way more of a red flag than seeing the “elevate permissions” pop up on Windows.
My biggest disadvantage of atomic distros is flatpak reliance too. I hate how bad the terminal interface for managing/running flatpaks is. But I still hope that this will improve in the future.
I feel like flatseal mitigates this a bit but I do agree that flatpaks have room to improve. Particularly with making sure flatpaks are verified against the open source projects they are made from.
I agree. Fundamentally, you still need good distros to plug into distrobox to make swapping between immutable systems quicker. In general I feel like running Fedora Atomic has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of using distrobox + boxbuddy to get quick and easy installs from AUR or something and saving annoying-to-make configs in a backup file somewhere.
Sounds like a good way to do Linux phones.
This is the least of the issues that Linux phones are facing though. It’s mostly the drivers that are lacking. Linux phones are also one of the areas where you actually don’t want flatpak and docker bloating up your system with duplicated dependencies because you have limited storage.
An image-based system would be the bare minimum to achieve basic security, but there would still be so many security issues compared to Android and iOS, that I don’t think Linux phones are worth putting time and development effort into.
AOSP is a fantastic base for open source mobile systems. The FOSS mobile development community should rather shift its focus to AOSP, develop a good understanding of it and get familiar with the code, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with mobile Linux distros.
The vast majority of the FOSS mobile development community has already shifted to AOSP. “Proper” mobile Linux has never been a serious thing except maybe during the Nokia N900 era (It was released in 2009.). So I don’t really get what you’re trying to say with that statement. Also the main thing that’s lacking for mobile Linux are the drivers and hardware*, so there it does not really matter whether it’s Linux “proper” or Android because the low level stuff is pretty much the same.
*With hardware I mean that the devices are not designed to be tinkered with unless it’s Pinephone like Linux phone, where the problem are said drivers.
“Proper” mobile Linux has never been a serious thing except maybe during the Nokia N900 era (It was released in 2009.). So I don’t really get what you’re trying to say with that statement.
I’m talking about developments such as postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch/UBports, Phosh (mobile GNOME), Plasma Mobile, etc.
I see so many people here on Lemmy who are desperately waiting for Linux phones to replace their iPhones or Android phones, without realizing that idea is absolutely utopian and unrealistic.
We really cannot rely on aosp because while google in control of source code and not take any contribution to code we have in relastic case "u permitted to read code and clone " and back feedback and as result we will have aosp as google wish it only for their own profits and theirs views how they see it.I am not even talking that they not use any enforce policy that manufactures cannot lock bootloader without ability to unlock
Honestly, I haven’t considered this before but it sounds like a great idea.
