So, slightly tangential, but I have a failed home automation project this past week.

I have been using an unofficial integration for my mini-splits for a few years. The guy who wrote it likes to disappear for 6 months at a time and it seems like it may be abandoned. It finally stopped working after a home assistant update.

I had bought some ESP based replacement dongles about a year ago and decided to finally use them. Well, not all of the features worked, so I set about writing my own firmware.

That ended up working even less well. I wasted a lot of time and effort trying to get my firmware to work before giving up and just moving to the fork of the original Home Assistant integration for the official dongles.

I hate being beholden to third party stuff like this because I have robust automation setup for my mini-splits and updates can completely break them and be a massive pain to fix.

I’m not sad I tried and failed so much as I’m just sad it didn’t work. I may try again sometime in the future.

That’s what Distrobox is for. It’s super useful.

Have you looked at any of the Universal Blue OSs based off of Silverblue? You can rebase to them extremely easily and try them out with no risk.

https://universal-blue.org/

All of Linux requires specialized knowledge. Immutable just takes different knowledge.

The real kicker with that is just that you can’t always just follow instructions you find online. Usually you can, as long as you’re doing them in a Distrobox, though.

I went with immutable as a newbie, and I think it’s great. It feels like getting in on the ground floor of the future.

Debian sounds like a great fit for you. But it’s good to know that Universal Blue has a lot of tools available for installing and tinkering that many just don’t know about. They are extremely powerful OSs.

Who knows. People are passionate about Linux. And downvoting takes no effort. And people downvote stuff randomly.

And Homebrew. I’m a developer and I’ve done all my work just with Homebrew.

You have to reboot machines to run secure kernel code. High uptime means running outdated, vulnerable system code.

Did you ever try using Distrobox? That’s the recommended way if installing random apps.

These distros are great for beginners or less technically savvy. They’re really just harder for people who have been using Linux forever and are very accustomed to the old ways.

Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer’s distros. It’s just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.

Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you’re being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don’t like it or it doesn’t work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.

Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I’m new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I’ve rebased three times. It’s really cool to be able to do that.

You can install packages in immutable distros. It’s just not as easy and recommended as a last resort.

With Universal Blue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) you can install packages with “layering”. It’s basically modifying the image by adding packages on top of what is shipped by the distro, and those packages get added each time the image is updated.

The better, more involved solution is to create your own image from the base image. That gives you a lot more control. You can even remove packages from the base image.

Hopefully you’ve had time to read some ify the replies from the folks behind Bazzite.

I would argue that it’s not bad marketing because no one is marketing it. Universal Blue, and by extension Bazzite, is a purely FOSS, community run endeavor.

Just because cloud became an over used buzzword by tech vulture capitalists, doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to what they’re doing, and it doesn’t mean that it’s suspicious.

Universal Blue is built by good folks making good shit.

Oh hey Jorge! 👋

No reason you can’t use NixOS in a VM on Proxmox.

My container host OS is another immutable, uCore, which I run in a VM on Proxmox.

I did this recently. Opendrive is free up to 5 gb and works with rclone. All I’m backing up is the config and data needed to recreate my containerized services. I’ve even had to recreate them from the backup, once.

And you sound like the entrenched Windows user who doesn’t realize all of the little things they’ve internalized to keep their system working the way they want to. I should know, I was one of those Windows users until recently.

Regarding other tools, they really aren’t necessary for most users. I don’t even use Distrobox. Flathub for UI apps, and Homebrew for CLI apps serves all of my needs.

I believe that Jorge Castro is right about the Linux desktop. It has failed, and it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. And that’s what they’re doing. Universal Blue is a completely different mindset from traditional distros, and I think it’s the future.

And that’s the great thing about Linux. You can continue to use the old methods you’re used to and have built up 25 years of muscle memory around.

The N100 is such a little powerhouse and I’m sad they haven’t managed to produce anything better. All of the “upgrades” are either just not enough of an upgrade for the money, it just more power hungry.

Universal Blue OSs (Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora) are actually way easier than immutable is made out to be.

For one thing, there is no such thing as keeping the system and packages up to date. That all happens automatically as long as you restart your computer every now and then.

It is true that if someone is looking up how to install something online it could be confusing. But anything in Flathub is obviously dead simple.

I think if there were better demos and tutorials, it would seem a lot easier.

For instance, if you can’t find something in Flathub, and the only instructions you can find are for installing in Ubuntu, all you have to do is use Boxbuddy/Distrobox and use an Ubuntu container and install it there using the instructions.

It really is the best of almost all worlds. Granted, this setup doesn’t work for 100% of software. But it works for the vast majority.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I will. I have a question, though. Can this be used on a remote server over ssh?

This was going to be my suggestion. Use Bluefin (not the “dx” developer flavor) gts stream.

It updates automatically in the background. All you have to do is restart it for updates to become active. So as long as it’s restarted once a month or so, you’re golden.