Feelings on immutable atomic distros

I’m currently working on a project to get Bazzite features on a non-atomic Fedora KDE Plasma installation. At the moment, it’s a work-in-progress justfile. I intend to test it out on a Fedora virtual machine.

But, sigh.

I’m still kind of torn between this project and CachyOS. Everything just works the way I want on CachyOS. There is no hard reason for me to use Fedora. The only thing inspiring me to do this that I’m just used to and like the Fedora ecosystem.

I don’t want to use Bazzite anymore – I just don’t like the restrictiveness of the atomic/immutable filesystem. It was a moderate burden that I tolerated for a few months, but it gets in the way a lot.

Sure, there are ways to do the things I want in atomic/immutable distros, but it tends to require some convoluted hack with containers and CI workflows and trial and error that I’d prefer not to spend time on. I feel like in some ways it’s a just nerd harder thing, for a sense of accomplishment for doing something hard that didn’t really need doing in the first place. It feels like building a Rube Goldberg machine. Whereas all it takes on a normal filesystem is a single command or script that, for example, changes something in /usr/share.

I can’t say whether immutable/atomic distros are “the future of Linux” in the sense that non-immutable distros will “die out” eventually. They clearly have a strong foothold in the wider Linux ecosystem, so they will be around for a long time. In that sense, they are a big part of the future of Linux. My fear is that, with enough backing from corporate sponsors and the consequent momentum/pressure this puts on other distros, immutable distros might eventually become the de facto standard for Linux, and render the non-immutable distros niche. But this fear is exactly that, and doesn’t necessarily coincide with reality. There are strong communities behind the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, et al, which tend to push back against corporate influence.