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Upstream images vs bazzite: https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_upstream_with_bazzite.svg
My prediction: bazzite may have more installs than Fedora KDE by the end of the year.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Bazzite is awesome. Not surprised it’s so successful. Congrats to the team. :)
While I see value in something as NixOs for the reproducibility. I do not understand what is the value in having an immutable system. I'm not saying there's no value, I just can not imagine a use case in which it is better than a normal system.
It protects against system breakage and malware because the core of the OS is sealed and updates can only fully complete or fully fail, you can't have a half-uodated system like Ubuntu would be if you unplugged the PC half way through.
And because your apps and commandline tools are sandboxed with Flatpak and toolbox/distrobox so malware getting in through one doesn't compromise the whole system.
I like Bazzite because it has a bunch of optimisations for getting games runnin well, and because it disallows applications screwing with the system. If I really need an application that demands it's files be put in a bunch of places I can't audit easily, it can go in a toolbox and not impact the system, or I can audit exactly what it does and layer it into the system.
For a Linux newbie, I really appreciate a system that stays what it is, and doesn't let anything change that without my explicit approval.
I'll give my own nerdy answer, besides the "good for amateurs" one.
Personally, I'm pretty techy, but I use my PC primarily as a living room gaming PC. As such, keeping it working is paramount, although I can't resist tinkering with it anyway. I was afraid an immutable OS would limit my tinker projects, but I've found it to be a total non-issue. Even for complex tasks like self-hosting AI to play around with, podman has served admirably. Honestly, it gives me confidence to try more ballsy things than I would otherwise, rather than limiting me.
Additionally, I like the feeling that my core system is essentially unbreakable. Even if I ran sudo rm -rf, I don't even have the ability to truly pooch things. Similar deal for any virus or hacker that might access my hardware, you can't hide weird behaviour deep in my system, it's immutable. I've also crashed my computer a few times by blowing through my VRAM budget while tinkering with self-hosting AI, and such crashes don't scare me, I've got easy rollbacks if I crashed my PC while it was doing something delicate.
I'm even running the testing branch right now (I want earlier access to the latest Mesa, as it has bugfixes for the DOOM DLC), and I don't have to fear anything from an unstable branch. If it breaks, I can trivially rollback and switch branches to the latest stable in a few minutes, with immense confidence.
I love the assurance it gives, and the only thing it's ever blocked me from doing was installing my VPN client, but an OpenVPN config has done that job just fine. I'd consider switching to CachyOS, but the main reason I haven't is that I'd miss the comfort of my OS being immutable.
A htpc in which you just need to launch media
A steam Deck like handheld in which you just want your game launcher
A PC for a kid whom you don't want messing around with system files
A PC for your technologically inept family members to just use as an email/browser/word processor
I honestly think the kid example is a counter example. Kids now don't understand technology, because we try to keep them so far away from how it actually works. I'm very technologically literate because I was messing around with my system as a kid.
It's the same as how older generations can take apart an engine, and most people now can't even change their own oil. We try to "protect" users from the technology, and they never learn how it works. No, they should be given access to break it. That's how you learn how it functions.
Because when I finish my 10 hour shift, get home from my 2 hour commute, to my 6 year old kid crying because she managed to fuck her Minecraft machine up somehow, I don't want to spend my only free half hour that day trying to work or what she did.
That's not a learning opportunity for her. Even if she had the patience to sit there and watch me try to fix it, she won't r get what I'm doing. And after getting up at 5.30, getting home at 7.30 watch how good I am at not just swearing at the thing instead.
Rsync changes each week to a network share with an A/B layout, switching backup targets back and forth each time. Something breaks? Remote in, rsync back, by the time you get home from work it’ll be back as it was and running already.
What if you have a system that just works and you can't break?
No rsync, no remoting from work (vpn or other software et al), no "i gotta be on alert for when my kid breaks my computer again"
Also, why do we have to shame people for just wanting to use their computer?
That's a wholly different problem right there. Namely the shitty wages and unaffordable housing. With proper wages, you would have the time for your kid since it would then be sufficient that only one of the parent works full time whereas the other takes care of the kid and the house and stuff like that.
I still miss the advantages for these cases.
I can understand the kid example, but I feel that's easily solved by not giving them root access.
Setup the system and install whatever media software. Update it every once in a while or setup auto updates. I do not see any difference between traditional os and immutable. You're likely not modifying any system files anyway.
The producing company controls software and updates, it should be immutable anyway as users likely do not have root access. Were users to have root access this may make sense. I'm not sure, maybe the immutability would make updates easier for the company?
Are they really going to brick their system? That would require opening the terminal. But I mean, fair.
What I do not understand is why there are users swearing by bazzite and other immutable distributions. These examples you make is basically for users who just do the most basic operations with their systems. Fair, if this makes it easier for non technical people to use Linux I'm all for it. What I do not understand is why technically adept people are so excited for these kinds of distributions?
I control a htpc with an Xbox gamepad. Bazzite I don't even think about updates, it just happens instead of saying "should probably update" and unplugging my nose and keyboard from my other PC. Or leaving mouse and keyboard sit on the floor in front of my tv cabinet.
Most handheld suppliers are shipping windows, replacing it with an immutable system is definitely the way to go. On screen keyboards are play I guess, but even my experience just doing a regular distro on a tablet it was a hassle.
Look, I'm not going into detail on this anymore. But I want to say I'm surprised by how much people are pushing back. "Oh instead of using bazzite, you could setup rsync to do an a/b switch with your server if something goes wrong". (Elsewhere in these comments).
I just didn't think it would be so much for people to accept there are use cases for why people do things differently to them.
Root vs non-root is, in a nutshell, a tangled mess with millions of opportunities for "oops, didn't think of that" situations: https://www.cve.org/downloads
Immutable keeps the legacy system confituration basically unchanged, but also restores it "from ROM" every time you power on. (not real ROM, but effectively.) In an immutable system, the attack surface is dramatically reduced, and much more diverse among systems than with a mutable OS.
I reckon this must be true. However I do not see this as a reason for wide adoption of immutable systems. I guess that is a fairly valid use case.
I'd like to understand why some users are enthusiastic about bazzite. As of now I understood two of the reasons:
However I do not understand why these two things make their users so enthusiastic. It's two things you rarely worry about when using a computer. They are indeed important, but in my opinion not much of a problem in modern distributions.
In the other hand you have to install everything through flatpak, which is something which would really get to my nerves.
I understand there are some good advantages, I just fail to understand which ones those are.
It's actually quite a lot more than a bit more secure. Think of it as the difference between traversing no-mans land on a bicycle (current systems) vs in an armored personnel carrier with armor thick enough to stop EVERYTHING that the other side can throw at it. Sure, you could just open the door of the APC and take a hit, but if you don't do that, you're pretty safe.
Are you trying to think logically about that question? Because that would be a huge mistake.
Yeah, not my favorite either. A BIG part of why I'm not loving the majority of the immutable systems I have investigated is because they all seem to heavily lean on tech like flatpak, snaps, etc. and there are valid logical reasons for that, but I'd really rather not go there...
It requires literally zero work from me to maintain, that's why I'm enthusiastic and want the project to do well. Saying mutable Linux is zero work is dead wrong. And if you do put work into your system, it actually sticks and doesn't decide to explode one day over it.
Run an update on a traditional system, and pull the power plug out when it’s half way through. If it recovers when you reboot it, you got pretty lucky.
Now do the same with an immutable system like Bazzite. It will be running the pre-update image when you reboot it. No harm done. It’s essentially impossible for an update (or even a failed update) to brick the system. You can always roll back to the last working image.
CachyOS does this just fine with bootable BTRFS snapshots before and after each update, without forcing me to use Flatpaks that don’t support all of the features of the normal apps or else break the immutability. For example, it's not possible to get all Discord features working in Flatpak (even with tinkering) due to inherent limitations of Flatpak.
The real problem is config drift. You have to maintain a lot of little fixes over time as you operate vanilla Linux. I've run fedora atomic (and rebased to bazzite when it got fairly big) since it launched years ago with only one relatively minor hiccup that was resolved by a single line in terminal (rpm-ostree rebase). You can layer stuff over it to modify the base image and clear it if something breaks, whereas manually removing critical packages and being sure to clear every file would be a nightmare on any other distro. It's an extremely hands off experience that works just like git does and is very bullet proof and reproducible.
I like putting it on old people's computers. It's perfect for a seamless experience.
It’s a little more effort to maintain compared to something like nix, but Arch (including CachyOS) doesn’t have the same config drift problem as distros like Debian, because it has pacdiff to let you consolidate any updated defaults with your own settings.
Yeah, a file system snapshot is another way of achieving safe upgrades. There are upsides and downsides of all approaches though.
Rolling back to a btrfs snapshot might be harder than just picking the other ostree image in GRUB. And you still have the problem where old binaries might be running when only the new binaries/libraries exist on disk. But it also saves space on disk compared to an immutable distro, and it’s much easier to make changes to system files. Every approach is a compromise.
It’s literally just picking which snapshot you want to boot in the boot loader and then accepting the prompt to make that one the new default after you’ve verified it works. It’s not possible for old binaries to be running.
I’m talking about when you update the system. Unless you reboot to do the update, the system can be using outdated binaries until you reboot. Apt will tell you about them, but I don’t know about other package managers.
Yeah rolling back snapshots is way more annoying than ostree and is kinda a shotgun solution. Also ostree saves more disk space.
It's the kind of thing they should have developed to release-ready state 20 years ago - when hard drives were already absurdly large vs needs of the OS and data.
That did happen btw! The project is called the android open source project
I tried bazzite and kinoite and they are great. Unfortunately I don't have a souped up gaming pc and I found them a little on the slow side compared to other distros.. I've been using NixOS for a couple of months and I am loving it. The system is responsive, the boot time is half that of bazzite and while perhaps it isn't ideal for someone's very first distro it also isn't that complicated, if I can figure it out 90% of other users could. I have all my old windows games working and my old hybrid Nvidia card chugging along nicely.
I can't tell you how many times I've had an update on a mutable system fuck my shit up to a point I just reinstalled the distro. Not having to worry about that is my primary reason for moving to immutable system. While malware and viruses are still mostly prevalent in the windows world, Linux isn't immune to it. That is, unless it's an immutable distro.