I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can't mess with the root without extra steps.
For anyone who isn't familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don't want to describe it because I am still learning.
My question is: what does the community think of it?
Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?
Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?
Any other input would be appreciated!
Personally, I have found the developer experience on Bluefin-dx (the only one I’ve tried…) to be…. mixed.
VSCode + Devcontainers, which are the recommended path, are pretty fiddly. I have spent as much time trying to get them to behave themselves as I have actually writing code.
Personally, I’ve resorted to using Homebrew to install dev tools. The CLI tools it installs are sandboxed to the user’s home directory and they have everything.
It’s not containers - I deploy stuff in containers all the time. But, at least right now, the tooling to actually develop inside containers is kind of awkward. Or at least that’s been my experience so far.
I think the ublue project is fantastic and I really like what they are doing. But most of the world of developer tooling just isn’t there yet. Everything you can think of has instructions on how to get it going in Ubuntu in a traditional installation. We just aren’t there yet with things like Devcontainers.
Using brew is the recommended method on uBlue, so you're already doing the right thing.
That being said, I use Jetbrains and devcontainers on Bluefin-DX and it's been flawless for me, straight out of the box.
Hmmm, interesting. I like brew, for sure. And devcontainers worked ok for me when I was working on something by myself.
But as soon as I started working on a side project with a friend, who uses Ubuntu and was not trying to develop inside a container, things got more complicated and I decided to just use brew instead. I’m sure I could have figured it out, but we are both working full time and have families and are just doing this for fun. I didn’t want to hold us up!
Our little project’s back end runs in a docker compose with a Postgres instance. It’s no problem to run it like that for testing.
Maybe a re-read of the documentation for devcontainers would help…