Look, I’ve only been a Linux user for a couple of years, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we’re not afraid to tinker. Most of us came from Windows or macOS at some point, ditching the mainstream for better control, privacy, or just to escape the corporate BS. We’re the people who choose the harder path when we think it’s worth it.

Which is why I find it so damn interesting that atomic distros haven’t caught on more. The landscape is incredibly diverse now - from gaming-focused Bazzite to the purely functional philosophy of Guix System. These distros couldn’t be more different in their approaches, but they all share this core atomic DNA.

These systems offer some seriously compelling stuff - updates that either work 100% or roll back automatically, no more “oops I bricked my system” moments, better security through immutability, and way fewer update headaches.

So what gives? Why aren’t more of us jumping on board? From my conversations and personal experience, I think it boils down to a few things:

Our current setups already work fine. Let’s be honest - when you’ve spent years perfecting your Arch or Debian setup, the thought of learning a whole new paradigm feels exhausting. Why fix what isn’t broken, right?

The learning curve seems steep. Yes, you can do pretty much everything on atomic distros that you can on traditional ones, but the how is different. Instead of apt install whatever and editing config files directly, you’re suddenly dealing with containers, layering, or declarative configs. It’s not necessarily harder, just… different.

The docs can be sparse. Traditional distros have decades of guides, forum posts, and StackExchange answers. Atomic systems? Not nearly as much. When something breaks at 2am, knowing there’s a million Google results for your error message is comforting.

I’ve been thinking about this because Linux has overcome similar hurdles before. Remember when gaming on Linux was basically impossible? Now we have the Steam Deck running an immutable SteamOS (of all things!) and my non-Linux friends are buying them without even realizing they’re using Linux. It just works.

So I’m genuinely curious - what’s keeping YOU from switching to an atomic distro? Is it specific software you need? Concerns about customization? Just can’t be bothered to learn new tricks?

Your answers might actually help developers focus on the right pain points. The atomic approach makes so much sense on paper that I’m convinced it’s the future - we just need to figure out what’s stopping people from making the jump today.

So what would it actually take to get you to switch? I’m all ears.

  • Crestwave@lemmy.world
    2·
    14 hours ago

    Atomic distros are not inherently immutable, although they often are because it’s an easy byproduct of atomic design.

    Atomicity means transactions are either applied in whole or not at all. That means that your system will never be stuck in a broken half-way state if it crashes during an update.

    In practice, this is often implemented through filesystem images that are mounted for instant changes. These are then often mounted as read-only for immutability, but distros usually have options to use them as read-write as well for tinkering.

    In my opinion, atomicity is the future. The risk of your system breaking during every upgrade is tolerable, but why not eliminate it altogether? Immutability is a different game and is mostly a preference thing.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      1·
      11 hours ago

      Thank you for the correction. So then, a more tinker-ready OS could do atomic upgrades, but allow manual changes/customisation to the system internals. And also handle traditional distribution-style package installation.

      I suppose some people might still want to upgrade certain packages and not others, but that seems a pretty rare case these days - or maybe I just don’t hang out in the right crowds!

      • Crestwave@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 hours ago

        I suppose some people might still want to upgrade certain packages and not others, but that seems a pretty rare case these days - or maybe I just don’t hang out in the right crowds!

        That would still be possible, actually! You can totally choose what packages to upgrade (depending on the distro). NixOS even lets you have multiple versions of the same package installed at once—another uninherent but easy byproduct of atomic design.

        Atomicity is just a technical part of how it works under the hood. Normally when you install, uninstall or remove something, it directly does those modifications to your system. If your power goes out halfway through, you’re in trouble.

        Most atomic distros do those changes to a separate filesystem image instead. Then when it’s finished, it instantaneously applies the all of the changes you did by mounting the new image. If your power went out halfway through, you’ll just be booting to the old image, untouched and pristine.

        That doesn’t limit what you can or can’t do. You can do all kinds of tinkering and all kinds of partial upgrades to the image (again, depending on the distro). But when it’s all done, you can apply all the changes you did instantly.

        Here’s another example. One way to atomically change a single file is to use mv. Moving within the same filesystem simply renames the file and does not transfer data.

        Imagine you’re adding a ton of lines to a live script, including rm -rf ~/tmpdir. If you directly modified it, there’s a chance that something could execute it while it was only partially written to the disk and run rm -rf ~ instead. Yikes.

        But if you wrote it to a separate file instead, you could apply your huge set of changes in an instant by using mv to replace the original file. That’s atomicity. It’s also actually how sudoedit/visudo works and one of the reasons why it’s recommended over just sudo "$EDITOR".