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Comment by bikelang | Hacker News Reader

Bazzite is my first immutable distro. Idk that I would want this for my dev machine - but for a gaming/general desktop usage it’s pretty amazing. If they exposed more of the maintenance tooling and stuff like adding RPM layers via the UI then I think they’d have a really compelling OS for non-technical users.

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I agree, if you have a specific dev flow that is compatible with the immutable OS approach, then these can be wonderful dev machines, but personally I don't want to change my workflow to fit the OS, I prefer the OS to fit my workflow.

At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry

I expected it to be an issue but I’ve had surprisingly few problems so far. If you’re working in docker-land or can use devcontainers, it just works. If you’re not but your stack is well supported by homebrew, also not a problem. Anything else you can handle via a distrobox container, where you can install from package managers to your heart’s content, and they have good integration with the base OS, but I’ve had to reach for distrobox a lot less than I expected.

Interesting, thanks! Out of curoisity would you (or anyone else) mind sharing some details about which stacks you work on? And have you done any GTK or linux native apps?

I do a decent amount of GTK and occasionaly Qt, and wonder if there's any extra friction for that

I’ve not done any native Linux app development I’m afraid, I can see that being quite painful…

I am mostly over in web application and Python ML land.

I had the dilemma of choosing between Bazzite and CachyOS or Manjaro for my workstation, which is also my gaming rig.

The whole immutable distro felt like a hinder for my workflow (running docker containers, etc.), so that's why I went for CachyOS.

I think you should take another look, especially at the “Bazzite developer experience” edition: container based development is pretty much what it’s centred around. Alternatively, Bluefin, which is much more dev focused

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