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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2021

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  • Honestly, I would say it isn’t great for anyone who has to do something low level even once. Now that there are open source nvidia kernel drivers that has solved a pretty big issue for most people who would be interested in immutable distros, but there are still many other drivers and issues that your regular user may face.

    One example off the top of my head is that flatpaks specifically can’t ship systemd services if I recall correctly. A lot of wayland apps for thigns like input have to use daemons because of wayland’s security model. Lact for AMD and now Nvidia GPU control, ydotool, or even gui versions of such tools for remapping input.

    Snaps require custom kernel modules that aren’t used outside of ubuntu, so I hesitate to trust them regardless of any of the other issues people have with them.

    This basically leaves appimages which aren’t available for everything and don’t always seem to work at least not as reliably as flatpak. I even tried to package the rstudio forensic software as an appimage myself, so I could have an easy way to use that proprietary piece of software, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get it to work with distrobox either using the official methods they provide to install it on linux. I did get it working in a chroot for some reason, but it had graphical issues. In the end, I made a PKGBUILD for arch and got it working that way.

    The point of all this is that a lot of times people say immutable is great for average, non tech savvy people, but I believe that literally everybody ends up needing to do low level stuff at least once or twice every so often. Which simply isn’t a great experience since you end up having to do layering which throws these theoretical average users right back into the normal complexity of a mutable system, but with even more uncertainty in my opinion.

    Now then with all of these caveats. I do still agree that immutable distros are great for the aforementioned group of people and I know this statement contradicts a lot of what I have described above. The reason why I think they are great for the less tech savvy people however isn’t because of any actual technical merit of the systems design though. Immutable distros are great for people like Linus Sebastion because it limits what they can do. You simply have to accept what is there the same way that you have to on proprietary systems like Mac and Windows. Those systems force you to do things a certain way unlike Linux and that is what people like Linus need because they have no business mucking around with the system to begin with.

    Lastly, all of this only works because devices like the Steam Deck are being run on specific hardware thus guaranteeing there compatibility. This is what we ultimately need. There would be much less need for low level operations to get drivers or change settings to make wifi or audio work right on a billion different devices if these people were buying linux compatible hardware in the first place.








  • Well yes, but not really as not all desktops agree on and implement various wayland protocols and other features like the system tray, server side decorations, etc, etc. Quite a number of apps don’t work everywhere or appear broken depending on their environment. I’ve seen it happen live in a couple of youtube videos. People trying linux and having a problem that only exists on the desktop environment they were using.

    But I agree with the sentiment. Better than before.









  • Yeah, was gonna say the same. It works fine for me on native steam. But flatpak steam needs flatpak mangohud. This was actually one of the reasons that I stopped using flatpak steam though. Not a problem against flatpaks or even that it didn’t work. Hell it worked even during times when native steam didn’t work.

    However, lots of small differences like this kinda make it harder to utilize existing software and information when the software and the communities around that software don’t have flatpak in mind.



  • The way permissions are listed on mobile operating these days is honestly pretty misleading.

    For example, I know some apps that need to request network permission even though they don’t need to connect to the internet. Not because they want to do anything shady, but because they legitably have to in order to get certain info.

    Not to mention the problem of listing everything an app can do as if it is doing all of those things.



  • I’m also a Plasma user, and I decided to try it out in a vm yesterday after reading this thread. It didn’t appear to play nicely in a vm. It was honestly the weirdest thing. Lots of freezes in my plasma session. Not the only distro that has problems in a vm, but still unexpected.

    Anyways, there were a lot more packages for it than I initially thought. However, still lacked some things that I wanted to use, and like nixOS it seems different enough that I would need to put in a bit of work to get those things working on alpine.