I like the universal blue distros. If your laptop specs aren’t great I would recommend Zirconium, as it’s a Niri-based atomic distro and runs great on my 10yo laptop. Bluefin is gnome based, Aurora is the KDE-based equivalent. Bazzite has both KDE and Gnome variants, and is similar to either of them but with more game tools steam installed at the system level. I am biased towards these distros because they’ve been the best linux user experience I’ve ever had for day to day use.

I know what you meant but its kinda funny to say “I want to mess with an immutable distro” 😀

Maybe Fedora Silverblue? Bluefin is built on top of Fedora anyways. You will find more support online for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite over Bluefin.

I know Bazzite over Silverblue/Kinoite can make sense so that you can have RPM steam and also not deal with the Nvidia driver hassle on immutable distros, but the advantages of using Bluefin is a bit unclear.

NixOS is surely what I’d recommend.

I like to tinker with an Arch Linux install using a VM to iterate quickly then translate almost ALL of the home dotfiles and preferences to deterministic nix code that absolutely LOCKS everything into place.

Some essential features/projects to incorporate into a decent nix config:

• nix flakes
• home-manager
• content-addressed and dynamic derivations (Eelco’s original paper writes about CA derivations as the holy grail)
• cachix (local cache) and community substituters
• forgejo (local forge with local CI to test nix flake updates for breakage and warm the local cache) I call it my “update canary”)
• nixos-anywhere/netboot/initrd boot scripting influenced by NixOS-anywhere but extended
• disko
• impermanance (lots of work up front declaring what persists between boots but this one is ESSENTIAL. This module makes it virtually impossible for a compromised package or virus to survive a reboot if things are done right.)
• sops-nix
• nixos-needs-reboot
• devenv/direnv

While the landscape of ‘atomic’ distros may look thriving, we can distill the amount of mature projects to just NixOS, Guix System and Fedora Atomic (and their derivatives).

Most of the other projects found e.g. here are unfortunately not worth your time in most cases.

As for which one to go with, that definitely depends on what you desire out of it (in alphabetical order):

• Do you want something that’s relatively easy to start out with? Then go with Fedora Atomic (or a derivative^[1]). From my personal testing, this one also seems to be the friendliest in terms of taking away many footguns.
• If two of the following strike a chord with ya, then you should heavily consider Guix Systems:
  • Enjoying/liking^[2] Lisp
  • Being passionate about F(L)OSS
  • Enjoying NixOS as a model, but being discontent with something^[3] that happens to be (better) (re)solved on Guix Systems
• NixOS is the OG^[4]. As such, there’s a lot of cruft. But within that mess, somehow, ironically, it holds the potential for setting up the cleanest OS. As you can guess, without a shred of doubt, it is the most mature and most powerful out of the bunch. So, if you’ve got exotic places you’d like to go with your distro, then -in a lot of cases- this is the only viable destination.

If you don’t like Gnome, use Aurora (the sister distro of Bluefin and Bazzite).

I used to play around with Aeon (built from opensuse). But it’s locked to Gnome only. I’d stick with Aurora or Bazzite instead.

All distros are immutable if you lost your root password.

I think NixOS is the way to go currently, but I personally would not use it due to the extra amount of work for little to no benefit on a single-user home machine.

The only immutable distro I’ve tried is Bazzite. It’s gaming-oriented, but can work well as a desktop. It also does offer a KDE edition, but for some reason they intentionally ship with some GNOME programs instead of the KDE ones. For example, a fresh KDE edition installation includes Ptyxis instead of Konsole.

Also, DistroWatch’s search has the option to only show immutable distros. It’s under the Distribution Category option. I figure that might help you find a few more options.

I’m a big proponen5 of bazzite. Been daily driving it on my laptop for well over a year (check my post history for details). Never needed to go into the command line to fix anything, never needed to worry about drivers. Basically as stable as windows (not now since windows actually is unstable with their vibe coded updates).