Sup penguin people.
I’ve been running various flavours and variations of Ubuntu for a while. I find I have to nuke and reset my laptop every 6ish months because things eventually stop working or I get weird bugs.
Recently I’ve been having this on and off problem where the computer just shows a black screen after turning it on. The only way to fix this is to tap keys repeatedly until a console shows up and it seems to kick the computer into gear and log in. Other times I have to restart 2-3 times before it logs me in.
I’ve had a lot of small issues like that (like having to jiggle the volume knob in the sound mixer to get sound working) and I’m wondering if switching to an immutable distro (like bazzite) would solve this apparent config creep.
I have a Steamdeck and it’s been solid and stable ever since I got it. I know it’s running an immutable distro and after researching a little bit it sounds like they can be more stable.
I’m no power user but I play some steam games and run a local 7b LLM and like to have a virtual machine or two for Windows XP emulation for some retro gaming.
Anyone have any opinions? What are your thoughts on immutable distros (like Bazzite)? Pros? Cons? Success/doom stories?
Edit: I’m back baby. 4 months later and still kicking it with Bazzite. Go immutable if you’re a former windows person and needs a computer to just work the way you’d expect without any configuration. I’m running all my steam games and plugging into my usb c dock for mouse keyboard webcam and 2 1080p monitor. I could never get that working on other distros. The future is immutable 🙌
Thank you so much for the reply!
NixOS really seems like a perfect fit in your case.
Interesting. All the declarative distros (I know) operate like that; at least to ensure being declarative. Would you prefer it if a
<insert favorite package manager> install <insert name of package>
would automatically modifyconfiguration.nix
?Fair. Hopefully work on official FOSS drivers provided by Nvidia (and others) will resolve this problem for good in the near future.
I’m glad to hear that you’ve been enjoying Bazzite and KDE!
FWIW, if you’d like to explore how declarative Fedora Atomic (and uBlue, hence Bazzite) are in their current iterations, then perhaps it’s worth looking at BlueBuild and uBlue’s own documentation on this. Though, I imagine that (based on your previous experience with NixOS) you wouldn’t necessarily approve of this. Though, I suppose drivers should work this time around.