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What's the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
I see lots of people recommending immutable distros to new users as if they are able to debug the inevitable breakages that occur or difficulty installing external programs.
This goes right with recommending Mint for gaming where Wayland is experimental and everything else is behind by several versions.
I'd say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I'm using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn't work on X11, but it hasn't pushed me to another distro just yet...
For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I'd say that actually something "immutable" like Bazzite might be one of the best options.
Is Wayland better for gaming than X?
For basic gaming the experience should be at the very least about equal for all GPU vendors right now. If you want anything fancy beyond that, like HDR or properly paced and multi-monitor VRR then Wayland is the only way to even have a chance of it working.
I've certainly found so. X11 is on life support at this point.
Time to use X12, boys
I've had multiple instances where games performed better on Wayland than on x.
Yeah this I don't understand. I do use immutable distros and quite like them(Bazzite/Aurora/Kinoite) but I would never recommend them to a new user to Linux. They just work too differently than most other distros so like 90% of the documentation you might find for other programs is pretty much useless. Like if you look up some piece of software and it says use your package manager to install, then what? It's usually easy enough to solve if you read the distro's docs and use their recommended approach(flatpak, brew, AppImage etc) but that's already probably way too advanced for someone new too Linux.
I think half the reason immutable distros started being recommended to people is the fallout after LTT's Linux challenge. I noticed some people presenting immutable distros as the solution to prevent things like accidentally removing the desktop.
NixOS is the new βI use arch btw.β
Well, it is pretty nice ..
I use both, btw.
Guix System is wildly different
I just don't get the hype of immutable. Sure, it's not easy to break and can be better for security, but it really does defeat the purpose of Linux freedom. It's only really good for absolute and total beginners (meaning those who aren't tech savvy), and for home console style PCs.
I would argue itβs the opposite of being good with beginners. Having used many distros for years, with most of my time spent in Arch and NixOS, nix basically follows zero Linux conventions and requires you to learn a new language, learn the conventions of the nix community and ecosystem (channels vs flakes, home manager, etc)
I primarily use nix but itβs specifically because I can write nix files and use them anywhere, so Iβm a hobbyist, not a beginner
Mint is good for total beginners. Arch is good for those that really want to learn how Linux works. Nix is for those that want a reproducible system, not beginners
Nix is quite a different experience to the other immutable distros though.
You still have freedom. Putting "read only" on some files isn't taking away fundamental freedom, it's a design choice. You can still meddle with it if you go further up the chain (e.g. make your own OS fork), just like you can meddle with your normal, pre-packaged Linux kernel if you want to compile it yourself.
I think even the most power of power users could appreciate an immutable distro in the right situation: if it's the right fit and you don't need to tweak those details, immutability gives you some technical benefits as a trade-off.
I personally just don't want to mess with "the core" of my PC
I like to install a lot of stuff from all around, and usually they all have these different dependencies that I might have to install separately... I use immutable because I want to know that I can purge any of that stuff easily without messing with anything else, because it's all separated from each other.
An example on the windows side is a Tetramino stacking game called "DTET". It's so old that I had to install some runtime from Visual Basic 6 to run it. When I no longer need DTET, am I going to remember to remove it?
With immutable, I can just nuke whatever container I installed the program in if need be.