Linux

The barrier for me is that I use a lot of apps which require native messaging for inter-program communication (keepass browser, citation managers talking to Libreoffice, etc.), and the portal hasn't been implemented yet. Its been stuck in PR comment hell for years. Looks like its getting close, but flatpak-only is a hard no go for me until then.

Even after that, I would worry about doing some Dev work on atomic distros, and I worry about running into other hard barriers in the future.

But the more apps the more the dedup is saving space

I’ve had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should’ve been dead simple on other distros, I’m really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.

Yes, some toolchain expect you to run pre-compiled dynamically linked binaries. These won't work on NixOS, you need to either find a way to install the binary from nix and force the toolchain to use it or run patchelf on it somehow.

Same issue, I still use nix on m'y laptop because it's neat as can be, but I have to admit developing on nix can be quite a hassle if you don't go it "the nix way", moreover some packages don't work as well because nix doesn't link binaries the standard way (zed editor for example)

NixOS likely only refused to run it because you weren't running it in the Nix way. That's not a jab or anything, Nix has a huge learning curve and requires doing a lot differently. You're supposed to use devshells whenever doing development. If you want something to just work, you use a container.

Whatever issue you ran into most likely had nothing to do with NixOS being immutable, and was probably caused by the non standard filesystem hierarchy, which prevents random dynamically linked binaries from running.

I've never heard of flatpak and immutability being obstacles to developers, in fact I generally hear the opposite. Bluefin is primarily targeted at developers, and some apps, like Bottles, will only officially support the flatpak distribution because of the simplicity and benefits it brings over standard distro packaging.

It would be a problem without distrobox. Since that gives you a normal, mutable OS on top, you don't even notice the immutability.

Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer's distros. It's just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.

Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you're being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don't like it or it doesn't work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.

Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I'm new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I've rebased three times. It's really cool to be able to do that.

So Bazzite basically is an immutable 3rd-party SteamOS. It was originally designed for handhelds (though has desktop images now) and includes the Steam Deck's gamemode package. That means it has the same interface, but working on a Legion Go or an Ally X. If anyone here has* any of those three you should seriously check it out!

The other thing as well is that more often than not, the update will succeed and you won't figure out until the next boot that something is wrong. However, Bazzite has a rollback tool so you can just change back to the previous image, reboot again and get to gaming.

That's the best reason for immutable for gaming IMO. I don't want to be fucking around with the OS when I'm in the mood to game. Being able to quickly rollback and jump into things in ~10 minutes or less is how it should be.