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?

  • fullstackhipster@awful.systems
    0·
    5 months ago

    Thanks for clarifying! I can totally see where that sort of stuff can really mess things up.

    My experience with development environments has been a bit better: Node works out of the box, no problem. For Ruby, the workflow took a little setting up (with bundix), but ended up working very reliably. For R, I actually enjoy that I can set up all my packages with home-manager and they get updated in my regular update cycle and it’s not a separate process altogether.