Last time I touched immutables I couldn’t run software for censorship-resistant VPNs. Regular services are all blocked in my area (even more sophisticated ones like Mullvad and onion-routed Proton tunnels), so it takes a more involved software that doesn’t work on immutables. That was a dealbreaker for me personally.
Besides, some things work better as native packages, not Flatpaks or Distroboxes. Wine is a simple example - sure, you can use Flatpaks like Bottles or Lutris or PortProton, but if you just want Wine without bells and whistles, native packet works much better than Flatpak.
Interesringly, ostree didn’t solve the VPN issue for me, and for others too. Works fine on all mutable distros I tried, though (including regular Fedora editions).
Can’t remember how it went with Wine. Besides, as far as I remember, installing native packets via ostree drastically increases update size and adds extra entries to manage, putting a limit on how much stuff you can reasonably install this way.
With that, I figured I’d rather take mutable system and apply good practices to it whenever possible. Snapshots? Check. Flatpaks? Always preferred. Sane management for native app repos? Yes. And with that, I never had my system fail me.
My use case can be a bit rare and specific, but there are plenty of different “rare issues” out there, and there’s nothing more frustrating than figuring out your distro doesn’t work with thing X and nothing can be done about it.
Immutable distros are cool, and hopefully it will all get resolved in a sane way. But to me, we’re not there yet.
Last time I touched immutables I couldn’t run software for censorship-resistant VPNs. Regular services are all blocked in my area (even more sophisticated ones like Mullvad and onion-routed Proton tunnels), so it takes a more involved software that doesn’t work on immutables. That was a dealbreaker for me personally.
Besides, some things work better as native packages, not Flatpaks or Distroboxes. Wine is a simple example - sure, you can use Flatpaks like Bottles or Lutris or PortProton, but if you just want Wine without bells and whistles, native packet works much better than Flatpak.
You could have used rpm-ostree for that. All of that, actually.
Interesringly, ostree didn’t solve the VPN issue for me, and for others too. Works fine on all mutable distros I tried, though (including regular Fedora editions).
Can’t remember how it went with Wine. Besides, as far as I remember, installing native packets via ostree drastically increases update size and adds extra entries to manage, putting a limit on how much stuff you can reasonably install this way.
With that, I figured I’d rather take mutable system and apply good practices to it whenever possible. Snapshots? Check. Flatpaks? Always preferred. Sane management for native app repos? Yes. And with that, I never had my system fail me.
My use case can be a bit rare and specific, but there are plenty of different “rare issues” out there, and there’s nothing more frustrating than figuring out your distro doesn’t work with thing X and nothing can be done about it.
Immutable distros are cool, and hopefully it will all get resolved in a sane way. But to me, we’re not there yet.