Look, I’ve only been a Linux user for a couple of years, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we’re not afraid to tinker. Most of us came from Windows or macOS at some point, ditching the mainstream for better control, privacy, or just to escape the corporate BS. We’re the people who choose the harder path when we think it’s worth it.
Which is why I find it so damn interesting that atomic distros haven’t caught on more. The landscape is incredibly diverse now - from gaming-focused Bazzite to the purely functional philosophy of Guix System. These distros couldn’t be more different in their approaches, but they all share this core atomic DNA.
These systems offer some seriously compelling stuff - updates that either work 100% or roll back automatically, no more “oops I bricked my system” moments, better security through immutability, and way fewer update headaches.
So what gives? Why aren’t more of us jumping on board? From my conversations and personal experience, I think it boils down to a few things:
Our current setups already work fine. Let’s be honest - when you’ve spent years perfecting your Arch or Debian setup, the thought of learning a whole new paradigm feels exhausting. Why fix what isn’t broken, right?
The learning curve seems steep. Yes, you can do pretty much everything on atomic distros that you can on traditional ones, but the how is different. Instead of apt install whatever and editing config files directly, you’re suddenly dealing with containers, layering, or declarative configs. It’s not necessarily harder, just… different.
The docs can be sparse. Traditional distros have decades of guides, forum posts, and StackExchange answers. Atomic systems? Not nearly as much. When something breaks at 2am, knowing there’s a million Google results for your error message is comforting.
I’ve been thinking about this because Linux has overcome similar hurdles before. Remember when gaming on Linux was basically impossible? Now we have the Steam Deck running an immutable SteamOS (of all things!) and my non-Linux friends are buying them without even realizing they’re using Linux. It just works.
So I’m genuinely curious - what’s keeping YOU from switching to an atomic distro? Is it specific software you need? Concerns about customization? Just can’t be bothered to learn new tricks?
Your answers might actually help developers focus on the right pain points. The atomic approach makes so much sense on paper that I’m convinced it’s the future - we just need to figure out what’s stopping people from making the jump today.
So what would it actually take to get you to switch? I’m all ears.
I switched to nixos years ago. Its better now than it ever has been as far as available packages and etc. But it does present issues if you get off the beaten path - the “now you have two problems” issue. For instance:
- if software is not packaged for nixos already, you won’t be able to follow the ‘build from source’ directions on its github page or etc. You have to make a nix package or at least development environment first. That can be tricky and you won’t have help from the software dev.
- If software downloads exes that require libraries to be in a certain standard location, well, they won’t work. Android studio for instance, downloads compilers and so forth. There are workarounds, mostly, but it can take a while to discover and get working and I’m sure many people give up. Again, the android studio software and documentation will be no help at all.
That said, more and more projects are supporting nix, and nixpkgs has gotten really big. I think they support more packages than any other distro now.
Near as I can tell they’re primarily aimed at desktop users who want to treat their computer like a smartphone.
I do software development and need a ton of tools installed that aren’t just “flatpaks”. IntelliJ, Pycharm, sdkman, pyenv, Oracle libraries and binaries, databases, etc. The last time I tried this I ran into a bunch of issues. And for what gain? Basically zero.
I don’t think that’s a very accurate assessment at all. NixOS, VanillaOS, and Bluefin are three of the first atomic distro’s I think of and they’re all heavily aimed at developers. All of them offer features to help separate development environments, which improve reproducibility of packages and environments. I prefer the Nix approach to containers, but each one definitely offers benefits for software development.
I do software development and need a ton of tools installed that aren’t just “flatpaks”.
Every atomic distro supports distrobox and other containerization tools, and many support Nix and brew.
These distros are good for people who want to treat their desktop like a phone, but flatpak kinda lets you do that on any distro. Atomic distros are great for those who want to use tools to separate development environments for purity and tinker with the ability to easily rollback.
I really like Debian stable, and have for a very long time. I’m not too fearful of fucking up the system because Debian stable is more stable than most anvils, and I have timeshift installed with regular backups configured which get stored locally and to a RAID 5 array on my NAS system (which is also running Debian). Anything super duper important I also put onto a cloud host I have in Switzerland.
If I want to do something insane to the system, which is rare, then I test it extensively in virtualization first until I am comfortable enough to do it on my actual system, take backups, and then do it.
I am working to make my backup/disaster recovery solution even better, but as it stands I could blow my PC up with a stick of dynamite and have a working system running a day later with access to all of my stuff as it was this morning so long as a store that sells system hardware is open locally. If it were a disk failure, or something in software, It would take less than a day to recover.
So what keeps me from switching is that I really do not see a need to, and I like my OS.
Same. Been using debian stable for over two decades. It does everything I need,
At work we use EL distros in vms. All of them are backed up by image every 3 hours, so a non-booting system is generally best dealt with by simply restoring the whole vm from before the change.
I’m not opposed to atomics, but I don’t have the need and haven’t yet invested much time into learning their differences.
I tried Silverblue.
And I wanted to run it without layering, cause everyone tells you to avoid it, since it kinda defeats the purpose of an atomic distro in the first place.First of all, it was buggy. As an example, automatic updates didn’t work, I had to click the update button and reboot twice for it to actually apply, even though it was activated in the settings.
None of the docs helped (actually, there wasn’t any in-depth documentation at all). And no one had a solution besides “It should actually just work”.
That’s the main advantage (the devs test with the exact same system you run) gone right from the start.Then Firefox is part of the base image, but it’s Fedora’s version, which doesn’t come with all codecs.
If you install Firefox from Flathub, you now have 2 Firefox’s installed, with identical icons in the GUI. So you need to hide one by deleting its desktop file. Except you can’t. So you have to copy it into your home directory and edit it with a text editor to hide the icon.
Then I went through all the installed programs to replace the Fedora version with the Flathub version, cause what’s the point of Flatpak if I’m using derivative versions? I want what the app’s dev made.Then it was missing command line tools I’m used to. Installing them in a container didn’t work well cause they need access to the entire system.
Finally, I realized even Gnome Tweaks wasn’t part of the installation, and it isn’t available as Flatpak.
That’s the point where I tipped my hat and went back to Debian. Which isn’t atomic, but never gave me any issues in the first place.Maybe it’s better now, I was on the previous version. Or maybe the Ublue flavours are better. But I don’t see any reason to start distro-hopping again after that first experience.
I actually used bazzite as my first mainstream linux distro and I hated it because every second command I pasted in didn’t work and I didn’t understand why. I eventually figured out it was due to the immutable nature of bazzite and began telling everyone to never use bazzite because it doesn’t work very well.
Now I actually understand what the actual upsides are and why it’s different I will change to mainstream distros to actually get a hold of what it’s usually like before considering changing back over.
Lack of interest. It doesn’t solve any problems that I have.
I like fucking around and finding out. I also don’t like roll backs, real men only roll forwards :)
(don’t take that too seriously please)
oops I bricked my system
I honestly can’t think of a single time I’ve done this in the 20 years I’ve been using linux.
what’s keeping YOU from switching to an atomic distro
I dunno, it just seems like the latest fad. Debian/Arch work just fine.
idk I’ve gotten mine into a state i couldnt fix more times than I can count. Immuteable distros have been a game changer for me and if I’m being honest I think they’re going to be the biggest thing for mainstream adoption in Linux’s entire history.
I think “atomic” means “a bunch of actions grouped together as one action”, so that the system won’t end up in a state where some required actions are missing and becomes unusable. But it doesn’t mean it’s unto itself making a system unbreakable: If your system starts in a state of malfunctioning, then it also takes a series of actions to fix it, be it atomic or not.
Most Linux distributions start in the state of functioning after installation.
All “atomic” distros I’ve encountered allow booting into previous versions, so this is simply not an issue.
I’m curious what you’re doing to your system that bricks it so often that would be considered a risk for a normal every-day normie user?
Upvoting but please stop using the term “bricking” this way. Bricking is permanent and there is no recovery. You have turned your device into a useless brick.
The whole “I bricked my system” thing is just ridiculous.
It actually happened to me today on Arch.
I updated the system, including the kernel, everything went smoothly with no errors or warnings, I rebooted, and it said the ZSTD image created by mkinitcpio was corrupt and it failed to boot.
I booted the arch install iso, chrooted into my installation and reinstalled the linux package, rebooted, and it worked again.
I have no explanation, this is on a perfectly working laptop with a high end SSD, no errors in memtest, not overclocked, and I’ve been using this Arch install for over a year.
The chances of the package being corrupt when I downloaded it and the hash still being correct are astronomically low, the chances of a cosmic ray hitting the RAM at just the right time are probably just as low, the fact that mkinitcpio doesn’t verify the images that it creates is shocking, the whole thing would have been avoided on an immutable distro with A/B partitions.
what’s keeping YOU from switching to an atomic distro?
I tried switching to VanillaOS a month ago. I had a hell of a time getting my niche use-case to work, consisting of using Syncthing to sync my Obsidian notes to a server via Tailscale. Apparently, I had to create a custom VanillaOS image just to install Tailscale? Also, I couldn’t get
wl-copyto work. Also, docs were out of date and missing.See notes: https://lemmy.today/post/25622342/14849341
I like Arch because I have control over the system. At least with VanillaOS (not sure about other immutable distros), it seems like I’m supposed to give up control or fight with the system to let me do what I want.
I actually have accidentally bricked my Linux system in the past, but that was a long time ago and I learned from the experience. So it’s not a problem I currently have.
I still haven’t gotten to doing this, but actually, I was thinking the locked down nature of VanillaOS might be fine for my parents. They currently only use their Mac for browsing the web and not much else. Seems like VanillaOS might be a good fit for users that don’t have very demanding computing needs.
Managing 30+ machines with NixOS in a single unified config, currently sitting at a total of around 17k lines of nix code.
In other words, I have put a lot of time into this. It was a very steep learning curve, but it’s paid for itself multiple times over by now.
For “newcomers”, my observations can be boiled down to this: if you only manage one machine, it’s not worth it. Maaaaaybe give home-manager a try and see if you like it.
Situation is probably different with things like Silverblue (IMO throwing those kinds of distros in with Guix and NixOS is a bit misleading - very different philosophy and user experience), but I can only talk about Nix here.
With Nix, the real benefit comes once you handle multiple machines. Identical or similar configurations get combined or parametrized. Config values set for Host A can be reused and decisions be made automatically based on it in Host B, for example:
- all hosts know my SSH pub keys from first boot, without ever having to configure anything in any of them
- my NAS IP is set once, all hosts requiring NAS access just reuse it implicitly
- creating new proxmox VMs just means adding, on average, 10 lines of nix config (saying: your ID will be this, you will run that service) and a single command, because the heavy lifting and configuring has already been done, once -…
I wonder if OP and about 3/4 of the people in here understand the difference between atomic and immutable.
I’m not sure I do, please can you explain?
Atomic distros update in a monolithic block and if it fails, it’s as if no part of it occurred.
Immutable distros have a readonly filesystem and you can’t change any part of the system without explicitly remounting the files to write, then doing your updates. It’s not necessarily atomic when that update occurs, either.
You don’t need to layer or containerize applications you install in an atomic system, you can install an application as normal with the system package manager, it just has to complete successfully to be installed, then it becomes part of the overall A/B update system.
Immutable distros need to containerize the installations, or use layering to apply applications to the underlying RO filesystem, which makes installing software rather a pain in the ass at times.
OP keeps using the word “atomic” but the questions and explanation are more about “immutable”. And my answer to them about why wouldn’t I use an immutable system is pretty much the last, installing/updating/troubleshooting non-system software is a pain in the ass. On a dev station, it’s a nightmare.
You are technically correct about “atomic” and “immutable”, but you’re missing that e.g. the Fedora images use the wording “atomic” to refer to their update procedure, and they implement this using an immutable system. Nobody here is misusing these terms, because they are both applicable in this context.
On a dev station, it’s a nightmare.
I’ve been very happy with it on my dev stations, definitely hasn’t been a nightmare!
