I’ve been running stock Fedora for about 5 years, but I’m really interested in immutable distros after putting Bazzite on my TV Gaming PC. Batteries-included works well for me in a use case like that.
I have about a decade of experience with containerisation, so leveraging that experience for my desktop is really appealing.
I took a look at Bluefin for my laptop, but it seems to be more opinionated than I’d like. I’m good with having an optimised kernel and tooling that makes sense for an immutable distro, but wasn’t a huge fan of preconfigured Gnome extensions and the software I don’t want.
I haven’t tried Silverblue yet, but I plan to do that next. Vanilla OS is on my list too, but more out of curiosity in how it does things.
My questions are: should I be looking at any other distros? Do I need to shift my expectations of an immutable distro even more?
I’ve yet to dig into the how , but I’m pretty sure you can set up a git workflow to build what #bluefin builds and then use your own customized docker file to add/remove apps and change settings to your liking.
I’m hoping to get this working myself when there are some ARM64 bluefin builds.
I currently manage >90% of my desktop Fedora install with Ansible, so this feels like a spiritual equivalent to that. If I could get the Bluefin folks to organise they layers the right way I could avoid needing to track what needs to be undone, and the extra storage and transfer needed for content I’ll hide under my layer. Definitely something to think about.
I was reading this thread thinking, “this isn’t the time to recommend NixOS that’s not what OP asked about.” But if you’re using Ansible this way NixOS might be a good fit for you. It’s got the advantages of the other immutable distros with the added feature of managing everything through a declarative configuration.