Linux

Don't use NixOS.

Source:

• I love NixOS
• I use it as my daily driver on multiple machines.
• I've contributed both to NixOS and surrounding ecosystem.

Evidence:

• Learning cliff rather than curve because:
• The state of the documentation should have been unacceptable a decade ago. Very unacceptable now.
• The tooling is also over a decade behind.
• Governance leaves a lot to be desired.

These things are getting better but not fast enough that I'd recommend it.

If you really want to look into nix, use it on another distro and see if you're still interested after getting a flake-based devshell together. (impossible challenge: do it for a python project that relies on complex dependencies like transformers)

Bazzite! It’s technically atomic and not fully immutable but I’ve been using it for about a week now (long time I know) and everything just works. Didn’t need to install any extra drivers to get it working with all my peripherals. I like it a lot. Fixed a lot of Wayland issues I was having on previous Ubuntu installs.

One feature I found really cool is the Waydroid and Boxbuddy integration. You can have Android apps installed alongside regular fedora apps. Just opens an Android emulator in the background. Discovered that last night by accident. Typed in “calculator” and it opened up the Android version of it. Really neat!

I'm surprised to hear you don't like Fedora. I recently tried Kinoite and I wish I'd discovered it sooner. I've never had a Linux distro that felt so detail-oriented and complete. I'd be curious to hear your reasoning!

Please don't hurt me but what's an "immutable" distro?

I’ve been using Opensuse Aeon just over a year and it’s done great.

Tumbleweed user for the last 5 years, and dealt with a few issues over that time. The usually infrequent update break that comes with rolling release. And the Opensuse ‘Patterns’ started, which I loathe and it’s a disaster to try to disable them every install.

Aeon hasn’t had any of those issues. It’s been very much a “turn it on and get to work”.

I’ve generally had less issues with Aeon than Tumbleweed - like certain flatpaks not crashing.

But downsides as I see them:

I’m not a gnome guy. It’s fine though, I don’t hate it. But some people can’t stand it.

I had a bit of trouble running wine. Something about the default security policy. There’s a known workaround.

Here's a resource I've been keeping in my back pocket for when I dive in:

https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

GNU Guix is the only other one I know about besides the ones you listed.

I've heard good things about VanillaOS. Not used it myself though.

With their package manager apx, you can use software from pretty much any distro in VanillaOS (copied from link above):

Apx is a tool that allows you to generate work environments based on any Linux distribution and seamlessly integrates them with the system in a convenient way ...

From OpenSUSE there's also leap micro. Never used it, but maybe worth looking at.

If you don't like fedora it might still be worth trying one of the fedora atomics, depending on what you didn't like. For instance, I could never get used to dnf, but it's largely irrelevant on an atomic distro anyways.

I would love to see a true atomic Debian-based distro, but I think that's a long way from maturity.

Edit: opensuse aeon will also be released soon, but at least the comments on this post seem to think that there's some important things missing from Suse atomic.

Currently, the only projects I'd refer to as (remotely) GA are ChimeraOS, Endless OS, Fedora Atomic, Guix System, NixOS and their derivatives. The rest is, unfortunately, simply not there yet. The closest to these would be openSUSE Aeon. But, if you'd like FDE on your device, then you'd have to forego it for now. Currently, I would advice against relying on any other projects; including Arkane Linux, AshOS, blendOS, carbonOS, MocaccinoOS, Nitrux, openSUSE Kalpa, rlxos and Vanilla OS. Unless, you're fine dealing with whatever random and fringe issues you may have to face.

As for the previously mentioned GA 'immutable' distros, you don't like to pursue Fedora Atomic, NixOS and their derivatives for IMO fair reasons. ChimeraOS is primarily an OOTB console experience distro (aka couch gaming) that happens to be 'immutable'. Therefore, bending it (to become your distro for general use) will definitely be an involved process. But, it's possible. Likewise, Endless OS is somewhat locked down (beyond what you'd expect from your average 'immutable' distro) and has to be bend (at least slightly) in order for it to be more suitable as a daily driver.

This leaves us with Guix System. IMO, if you want to pursue this right now, then Guix System is simply the only remaining way of going forward. It's fit to suit whatever needs you'd have and offers access to official documentation that's at least a decade ahead of the one found for NixOS. However, don't expect this to be entirely painless; 'immutable' distros require (in general) a bit more know-how compared to traditional distros. And within the 'immutable distros', Guix System and NixOS are uniquely positioned for how 'powerful' they feel compare to (literally) any other distro. But, with great power comes great responsibility. Hence, you should definitely know your shit.

Finally, if FDE is not a hard requirement for you and if you can live with GNOME and if don't have qualms against containerizing everything and if you don't intend to tinker, then you might also consider openSUSE Aeon.

There's also the Wayblue family of Wayland distros, based on Ublue.

It's hard to say for certain whether a distro will work for your hardware, even the Nvidia-specific images can have bugs related to the Nvidia drivers or their interaction with compositors.

I've used NixOS for a year.

I also tried Fedora Sway Atomic for a week or so. It mostly worked well, but I eventually found that it's really hard to use Nix for development on a graphics application, because linking with the system Vulkan drivers is near impossible. The loader used by Nix's glibc will ignore FHS locations. That seems to rule out a lot of the benefits of using Nix.

So I gave up on using Nix + Fedora as a failed experiment and went back to NixOS.

My wish list for Nix, Wayland, and Sway is pretty long. I kinda wish I had the time to make a new distro.

Opensuse Micro

Fedora Atomic is greag. uBlue is better ootb, but most of it can be simply achieved by layering some packages (rpm-fusion, enable auto updates through /etc/rpm-ostreed.conf).

NixOS is a whole nother beast and I'd only recommend it if you use standalone compositors (labwc, hyprland, sway, wayfire, river, ...), or want a declarative system.

Edit: Just read your comment about not liking Fedora. In that case I'd recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Other immutable distros are smaller and I don't have any experience with them. (IMO with atomic distros the distro doesn't matter much because apps are installed through flatpak or distrobox anyway.(

There is blendOS which is an arch based immutable distro similar to Vanilla OS with different DE options

Secureblue, GnomeOS (if you like updating daily), VanillaOS, AOSP, SteamOS, blendOS, and many more.