this post was submitted on 18 May 2026

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other immutable gaming distros? (piefed.social)

submitted 3 months ago by HubertManne@piefed.social to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Im wondering if there are any other immutable gamine distros besides bazzite. in particular im wondering if immutables use any other base. I swear I thought suse was doing custome type things long ago.

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[–] sp6@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Other than Fedora Atomic derivatives (like Bazzite) and of course SteamOS, the only big one I can think of is NixOS? It's certainly not tailored to gaming, but it does look like 2.4% of ProtonDB users run it

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

is nixos immutable?

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[–] hanke@feddit.nu 16 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I game on NixOS, ask me anything and I'll do my best to answer :)

To answer if NixOS is immutable, kind of yes if you want it to be immutable.

It can really be whatever you want it to be. If you:

Use flakes and
Keep your config in Git

Your system is pinned and reproducible.

Applying the same config on any other system would result in the exact same setup. All around.

When you want to update, you update the inputs to your flake, rebuild your system and switch into the new build.

If everything is good, you commit the updated flake file and any other system can pull it to update to the exact same config state.

It is magic and cool!

Also, if you want, it can be the complete opposite.

You can switch from the stable channels (new releases bi-annually) to the unstable channel (rolling release) and configure auto-updates.

Now you have a bleeding edge system that updates daily.

It is so cool.

I get that there is a lot of terms and stuff that is unclear, but it'll all clear up once you get into it :)

But yeah, it is a OS that revolves around config files and kind of "coding" your own system.

If that sounds like fun to you (I love it) give it a try! If that sounds daunting, maybe stick with Bazzite, CachyOS or something easy to use. NixOS is easy to work with once you get it, but so is rocket science I guess.

I am rambling. Give it a try! Or don't! 😄

I am going to migrate our living room gaming PC, my Raspberry Pi and my server machine to NixOS once I get the chance to.

This is my Linux endgame. I am not going back from here 😄

NixOS is not really a distro like other distros. It is more like a framework of creating the perfect custom distro that fits YOU.

If you've read this far, you're a champ 🙏

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 3 points 3 months ago

its kinda funny because something like this is why I liked puppy awhile back.

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[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I absolutely love the idea of NixOS and have tried it a few times, but I just can't wrap my head around the language and syntax. It hurts my brain. Which is sad for me, because it seems like magic until I run into a wall and it starts doing unexpected things and I go into the slippery slope of messy confusing code trying to patch things until it works the way I want it to and I soon have a unmaintainable spaghetti configuration I can no longer understand at all and I never escape the doomspiral.

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[–] hanke@feddit.nu 1 point 3 months ago

Yeah, it took me a good while to be comfortable. And I am still more or less a noob.

I'd say I don't fully understand the syntax properly, but I get around. The docs are great if you haven't checked them.

I have also been spitballing with AI to get input on how to attack new problems in there and I find that really helpful. If you are strongly anti-ai there are some good community chats on Discord, Matrix and elsewhere where people have been really kind and helpful as well.

My recommendation is:

Start a new system using a single flake
Add what you need, when you need it
When it starts feeling unmaintainable, take a step back, stop adding new stuff and figure out how you can refactor your system so that you are back in control

You have to think it is fun for it to be worth it really, but you seem sold on the concept, so I think you'll get there!

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[–] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I imagine that this also means it's your own responsibility to research and manage upgrades that the rest of the Linux world are making. For example, X11 -> Wayland, PulseAudio -> Pipewire. One of the benefits of using distros like Fedora or Debian is that you can trust them to make these changes for you. Reproducible is nice, but immutable distros give you a reproducible desktop that also evolves over time, without any effort from you.

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[–] hanke@feddit.nu 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Yeah, you have to define this stuff somewhere. But changing from one to another is simple.

This is my audio setup right now:

  services.pulseaudio.enable = false;
  services.pipewire = {
    enable = true;
    alsa.enable = true;
    alsa.support32Bit = true;
    pulse.enable = true;
  };

I will just keep rolling this until it constrains me somehow and then I will revisit it and improve it to fit my needs.

If you like NixOS, this is not a big burden really. Otherwise you are probably better off with some other dist, as you mentioned.

I don't see it as a big tradeoff, but that's because I like this way of doing things.

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[–] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

All the power to you! For me personally, what I've learned in the past few years of using Linux, is that installing things is just half the battle. The other half is discovering them and deciding whether they are worth the time and effort. And I found out about so many useful tools from the Fedora and Bazzite teams that I decided I'd rather let them make the choices for me. Things like pipewire, wayland, fzf, ptyxis, btrfs, podman, distrobox, bazaar, and so much more.

When I want to configure a declarative environment like people do on Nixos, I just use a container, devpod, or distrobox. These are all included on Bazzite DX. But for the base system I prefer to delegate trust to others to save me the time and energy. The maintainers test each tool, and make sure they are stable and work with the rest of the system, so that I don't have to. And in the future if I decide I don't like the direction that Bazzite is going, the rpm-ostree rebase system lets me use a single command to switch to a different distro maintained by a different team.

Though to be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Nixos had a similar system, and if they don't right now they probably will in the future. Things are changing fast!

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[–] hanke@feddit.nu 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah, same to you!

I don't like having to configure every detail of my computing experience. I like to be able to do so though. And that's part of what makes me love NixOS. Most things can be enabled with a service.<whatever>.enable = true and it is installed and set up with very sane defaults. Essentially what other maintainers do, only that you had to decide you wanted that service to begin with.

And for boring stuff like networking or whatever, I haven't made many desicions my self. That just came with the default config from my base install. I brought them with me as I evolved it, and as long as I don't need anything else, I won't be changing it either.

But yeah, I very much understand why someone would not want to use NixOS. It is great for those who like it and hell for those who just wants a set and forget system :)

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[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Or is the quintessential immutability.

Yes.

It's also a completely different way to handle ... everything.

Do not think about nixos if you want to know what to try for gaming.

Do look at it id you want to learn the ins and outs of ... Well, to be honest nixos. But I've learned a lot about standard paths that everyone expects to be there and hell's loose if they aren't.

Python runs amok if it can't write into it's beloved lib folders, nginx is utterly confused why it can't generate certificates on startup (read only folders), deployment dependencies are absolutely visible - and if you fick up the whole system just goes "nah, take a step back and think about what you just did".

I'm now pushing two years on my server and I'm still not sure if I'd recommend it - but I for sure enjoy it!

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

honestly im just not sure about red hat long term so was looking for alternatives but at the same time want to be able to play games pretty lazily.

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[–] mech@feddit.org 4 points 3 months ago

Not sure what you aren't sure about, but Fedora isn't made by Red Hat. It's the other way around. Red Hat takes Fedora as a base to make RHEL.
But Fedora is maintained by its community, not the company.

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[–] rozodru@piefed.world 6 points 3 months ago

it can be if you want it to be. I will say though, while I do love NixOS and it's my favourite distro, might be a bit of overkill if you just want something to game on. That said it can be done easily.

you can pretty much tailor it to however you want it. configure it how you want, however you want. Hell you could run the distro without installing anything if you so wished and still be able to game.

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[–] jlow@slrpnk.net 5 points 3 months ago

I have the immutable Gnome variant (Aeon) of Opensuse on my laptop, it's fine but I have to say I prefer Bazzite (comes with Tailscale, brew, ujust, can choose other snapshot on boot, Appimages work etc) which I use on my desktop.

[–] Leminski@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

Gaming distro specifically? I run games on Kiniote on my TV PC. Not a gaming distro but I've Heroic and Steam on it.

[–] voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Not necessarily gaming focused, but there is VanillaOS based on Debian.

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[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

Meanwhile PikaOS is based on Debian and gaming focused, but not immutable, if only you could combine them somehow. I am struggling to think of any other distros in the immutable gaming space besides Bazzite and SteamOS. Is Holo still a thing? There used to be a few other SteamOS clones out there, I remember ChimeraOS, not sure if it is/was immutable but you never really hear about it anymore.

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[–] voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 1 point 3 months ago

ChimeraOS is immutable and still alive. Bazzite with gaming mode ended up taking a lot of users from them(myself included).

For VanillaOS you could modify the image used just like Bazzite to get the packages and configuration that you want. I'm just not sure if there is enough of a desire to have something Debian based compared to what is offered by Bazzite.

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[–] KianaTabion@lemmy.today 2 points 3 months ago

This is mostly a matter of maturity and whether there is tooling to make this possible. As such, it's not surprising that only the more established atomic distros are part of the conversation. Those^[Factually speaking, Guix System is even older than Fedora Atomic. Hence, it deserves to be mentioned alongside the other two. However, I am simply unaware of a gaming distro that's based on Guix System. Which is exactly why it wasn't discussed alongside the others.] being Fedora Atomic and NixOS.

Besides Bazzite, Playtron GameOS is also based on Fedora Atomic.

As for NixOS-based gaming distros, there's Jovian NixOS and GLF OS.

FWIW, ChimeraOS is IIRC a notable exception to the above.

Note that none of these come close to Bazzite community-wise*.

[–] mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

yeh currently trying out SecureBlue.

it is....... interesting

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 1 point 3 months ago

my motivation though was kinda something not redhat. want to get away from redhat and ubuntu currently. Im lazy though so its a long term thing. Im writing this right now from a unbuntu based distro. Finally got to testing bazzite so I figured I would see what other options there are. Kinda miss play on linux though because I really like the right click and run thing.

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[–] yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

What about Bazzite isn't working for you right now?

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

nothing in particular. I am wrestling with getting games to launch outside of my steam account for things i have seperate logins for but I have barely dealt with it. I mean I have done it a lot but things seem to fail or get taken over by steam. Im actually thinking of uninstalling steam for testing purposes. What I have setup I plan to reinstall ultimately as I am goofing around a lot and want it relatively clean if and when I get it to my daily driver. Anyway I was asking for options mainly because part of the reason I am going to it is for gaming but part is because I like the immutable way of doing things but partly to get away from ubuntu but lately I want to get away from red hat as well.

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[–] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

What does 'outside your steam account for things you have separate logins for' mean?

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

some software steam automagically uses your steam credentials. I think part of it is deals with the game developers. So you have to launch the game such that your steam account does not get involved. So basically stand alone. Was easier with play on linux but lutris and wine-ge are not running what I want. I see in the lutris logs it seems to be still calling to steam proton areas even though I installed it with the wine option.

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[–] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

That's an interesting set of circumstances. Have you tried some thin sandboxing, like bottles, boxes, or containers? If you are trying to keep software from interacting with other software but run on the same hardware, that'd be what I'd try.

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social [S] 1 point 3 months ago

so the solution is super simple. you bring it into steam and then import it as a non steam game before running it. Then the reason I think lutris was bombing out on it is because I had to switch to using the latest non steam proton.

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[–] JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 1 point 3 months ago*

Not a gaming distro but OpenSUSE has Aeon and Kalpa that are arguably more secure with more volumes also being encrypted, focus on btrfs snapshots being reliable vs rpm-ostree style images, etc...

I used it before bazzite 2 years ago or so but it was a worse user experience in most ways even if there are technical benefits for it (steam via flatpak needing hours of figuring out non- documented modifications to get working, GRUB decryption that is not only slow and prone to errors but also doesn't show characters typed for a long passphrase and fails after the first try, volume mounting errors every other boot so booting would fail, and layering being worse than Fedora at the time, etc...)

And nobody can argue that openSUSE doesn't have the most fun mascot/logo haha.