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.
What about NixOS? It seems to be doing something very different from most distros. I used it briefly and it was a refreshing experience to just update the config file to add and remove programs, I know that a lot of people share their configs and it makes it easy to keep programs consistent from different installs. I would have installed it on this laptop if the installer wasn't giving me so many issues, so I ended up with MXLinux instead, but I still look on my NixOS days fondly.
It's on my list to try!
Having tried NixOS, I gotta say the ability to quickly restore everything from a single config (its main premise) is overrated when it comes to home systems. Invaluable for production environments, though.
The rest can be done on any other Linux, and it would probably be preferred by most.
I keep saying this.
If you're a sysadmin in charge of a bunch of computers, by all means use NixOS.
But for personal use? Its easier to install everything by hand every time you reset your laptop (which should be maybe once per year at most) than it is to set up a config file on NixOS.
It's about the certainty to have what you want, where you want it, reliably. I run NixOS with Impermanence, which means I reset my root partion on every boot, and have what state I need specifically opt-in. And I run a shared config over multiple devices (home PC and Laptop), so installing something on one also installs it on the other, next time I rebuild. It certainly takes time getting used to, but I've been really enjoying it so far
That's fine. Again, I don't understand the use case.
I certainly don't install or uninstall programs so often that I need to systematize it, and I only have 2 computers so its probably easier to just manually install them on each machine than to use some obscure coding language to achieve the same.
But to each their own. Linux is awesome also because of the options it offers to everybody.