Preface: I have been daily driving Fedora Atomic for the last couple of years and have also used a bit of Aeon and NixOS.

My opinion is that while atomic/immutable desktops are overall a good idea, they are marred by poor planning, a refusal to fix existing tools, and some cope.

There are way too many package managers and waste in this space. I think flatpak is a large cause of all this friction due to fact that it is always “sandboxed” and only focuses on GUI apps. The fact that it does not aim to support CLI apps (despite being able to handle them quite well!) means that we must have another tool, traditionally podman via toolbox/distrobox. The sandbox doesn’t play well with certain subsets of apps, notably things like VSCode. At least Flatpak Next seems like it will address this part with its unsandboxed mode.

I also find it quite strange how some developers revel in wasted space and inefficiency. So many duplicated libraries between the host, flatpak, podman, and homebrew. With better planning, we could’ve had shared runtimes (such as Freedesktop) between the OS, flatpak, and whatever CLI package manager. Instead we have something like Fedora packages for the host OS and podman (not shared), flatpak using Freedesktop, and brew shipping their own stuff.

I also think that systemd sysexts are poorly designed, it’s crazy they’re being pushed. It’s pretty much a package manager without dependency management. And for what upsides? It has no sandboxing, it’s not portable between distros and distro versions, and must vendor dependencies to work around having no concept of dependencies. And we’re already seeing fragmentation with Fedora and OpenSUSE working on their own frontends to manage sysexts.

They disabled it with flags, but manifest V2 still existed in the code and could be enabled. This is about Google now removing V2 from the code. That will make it harder for third party browsers to include V2, since they would need to patch it back in and develop new patches to keep it working.

Interesting, what hardware do you run?

I haven’t used Plasma for any significant length of time since 5.27. Coincidentally, the first major version of Plasma where Wayland was actually daily drivable for me, previous versions would have at least one desktop crash a day.

But my experience on Gnome Wayland has always been good. At least, better than X11, even on NVIDIA before the Wayland compatibility was “good”. Don’t remember exactly dates or version umbers, but it was shortly after it got hardware accelerated Xwayland and before NVIDIA added GBM support. And when I switched to AMD, it only got smoother and more stable.

And recently have been trying out labwc/wlroots and it’s been a very stable experience too.

6.12.90 is the latest release, you’re good. Just make sure you’ve rebooted since installing it.

Sorry, I guess labwc isn’t as well known as I thought it was.

labwc is a lightweight Wayland compositor based on wlroots. Unlike most other window managers, it uses “floating” windows (like Gnome and Plasma) rather than automatically tiled windows (like Sway and Hyprland).

I agree in the case of Fedora Atomic, they’ve stuck to flatpak and podman (so far, they have their system extension manager tool in the work) and have rpm layering as a fallback.

But not all atomic distros have that fallback. Universal Blue, more specifically Bluefin, does not want to allow layering at all; this is already implemented in the LTS version (though it’s just bootc, so you can build your own image to install rpms). This is also true for “distroless” models like Gnome OS (and there you don’t have any prebuilt packages to pull in even if you made your own buildstream image). So for these, you have to make-do with the package managers they provide or you’re out of luck.

In an ideal world, I think we should have a single package manager that sits on top the the OS that can handle everything: GUI apps, CLI tools, sandboxed by default but also able to be disabled completely for the apps that don’t work well with sandboxes. The closest thing we have to that right now is snap.

In an imperfect but more likely world, I would be fine with two package managers. Flatpak for GUI apps and something else for CLI tools. “Flatpak Next” could fix one issue with its unsandboxed mode. But I still haven’t found something that universally works well for CLI apps.

• Podman is the classic answer, but it can be a bit annoying jumping into and out of boxes. Doesn’t work well for more “system tooling” like Tailscale that also want services.
• Homebrew is a more modern suggestion and actually works pretty well. But I’m not a fan out how hijacks PATH in a way that can break OS packages (such as by making homebrew dbus and systemd used over OS versions). And last I tried, the homebrew version of tailscale didn’t work (though I have read that others did get it working).
• Coldbrew is an interesting alternative to coldbrew, which uses alpine packages and doesn’t mess with PATH directly, but it does place some stuff in .local/bin that could end up overriding some binaries anyway (though not to as high a degree as homebrew, and thankfully doesn’t affect libraries). But has integration issues due to sandboxing (personally had an issue where I had an app that wanted to open my browser, but it couldn’t see my browser because of the sandbox).
• I still need to test Nix on an atomic distro

When something as fundamental as git requires multiple obscure commands to install, you’ve got to think twice about the target audience.

Ideally the tooling gets better and you don’t have to do anything else but “toolname install package” or have a declarative list of what to install.

why Linux power users (i.e. most Linux users on lemmy) aren’t suited to immutable distros.

I think the main problem is that immutable distros haven’t thought things through from the beginning.

It started out as just using flatpak and podman. But each of those has limitations. But rather than improving them, we just keep creating / bringing in new package managers. Homebrew, cold brew, system extensions, nix, etc.

Funnily enough, the only entity who is sane in this regard is Canonical. If snap has a limitation, they just update snap to not have the limitation rather than brining in another package manager.

But honestly I think the biggest offender here is flatpak. If not for its mandatory sandbox and anti CLI tool stance, it could have handled everything. “Flatpak Next” seems to be address the first issue as it is planned to have an unsandboxed mode.