I am playing around with Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon and I really like the painless updates.
Still, my daily driver for some years now is Debian, and I have a decent setup via Ansible - everything just works for me.
My question is mostly to long term Linux users, which use Linux in a professional context and jumped from a distribution like Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE or Debian to NixOS, Silverblue, Aeon etc.
What is your experience? How did your workflows change on your immutable Linux distribution? Did you try immutable and went back to a more traditional distribution - why? How long are you running the immutable distribution and what issues and perks did you run into?
Thank you very much for your elaborate answer!
I agree with your advice, to not jump ship when everything works and that the new stuff doesn’t have to be better.
For Silverblue, I see the potential that it is an improvement over Debian for me. I used Fedora some years back, and it was always the distribution with my favorite community, besides its technical excellence. I played around with openSuse’s Aeon/MicroOS, and I love the update system for immutable systems. (Just reboot and be done with it.)
So, where I hope Silverblue will be a clear improvement for me:
- Immutable/automatic updates
- Updated software packages (No, not interested in running testing or unstable)
- Fedoras polish for Gnome users
- Containers for work stuff (At the moment I use whole VMs, which was one of the reasons to automate everything with Ansible)
The nice thing for me is, if it doesn’t work out with Silverblue, I can setup my Debian system via Ansible in no time.
It comes down on what is important to you.
Debian is great when you’re a bit more conservative and want to not change as much, and Fedora is more leading edge for new technologies. They implemented, for example, Wayland, Pipewire, and much more, as one of the first.
So, where I hope Silverblue will be a clear improvement
Don’t fixate to much on SB. There’s also VanillaOS out there, which is/ will be based on Debian and aims to be as user friendly as possible. Many of the pros are universal to most immutables.
- Containers for work stuff (At the moment I use whole VMs, which was one of the reasons to automate everything with Ansible)
You can already use Distrobox or Toolbx on Debian. But they don’t replace VMs and are more similar to Flatpak, giving you mostly runtimes and dependencies, but the host OS is still perfectly accessible.
Fedoras polish for Gnome users
Fedora doesn’t polish Gnome. They only provide vanilla desktops, KDE for example is also pretty much unchanged.
Difference is, that most other distros modify their DEs, which isn’t what the creators intended.
This is why, in my personal opinion, Gnome on Ubuntu sucks for example
