I've had my eye on Immutable Distributions ever since I discovered Sodalite in the pre-steam deck days, and have found the entire concept quite interesting: A Linux distro where the actual system is read-only, and as thus cannot be modified nearly as easily

Then, with the introduction of the Steam Deck, it peaked my interest again. So here I am, a couple of months after the Deck's release, I'm trying out Sodalite! Sodalite is installed by first installing Fedora Silverblue, and then following the instructions on their GitHub, from where you actually install it. After you've followed the instructions, rebooted and waited maybe like 30 seconds longer than usual... bam!, you got yourself a Pantheon desktop with all the usual goodies.

So, now I've been using this setup for a couple of hours, and I must say that I am really enjoying it! The System is quite hard to break out of my own idiocy, and with Sodalite-hacks I can install Nvidia's drivers ¹, remove junk files, install Flathub, and much more! (like installing VSCode for some reason...)

Apparently, there is also something called "Overlay Packages", which I'll have to look into, as brew is sadly refusing to install zsh :/

Overall, this seems like quite the interesting system, and I will be looking into it more and more as time passes. I'll update this post when I do!

1 - Nvidia's drivers tend to break on Fedora during and/or after install, Silverblue and by extension Sodalite are sadly no different :(

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Update 1:

I've been using Silverblue+Sodalite for around 3 days now, and I've figured out some things about how it works. After a reinstall due to broken rpm-ostree, I've been able to install zsh, alacritty, and some other important utility as layered packages, and thus was able to avoid other less important things in my image thanks to toolbox. toolbox is Fedora's own utility based on podman and some other utilities to easily create, manage and maintain containers. The containers automatically have access to your own /var/home directory, as well as a full Fedora system. It can even run graphical applications almost flawlessly! This is why I was able to install ProtonVPN under a container, and then connect from within! (Yes, VPNs work from within the container).

Overall, it seems to be pretty nice, whether you use Fedora Silverblue as-is, or with Sodalite, or even Fedora Kinoite. And thanks to containers, most issues are easily overcome, and they integrate surprisingly well into the desktop. However, a GUI for this would be nice, for less terminal-centric users, and also because toolbox has no utility to stop any given container, and podman has to be used manually instead (podman container stop <toolbox name>).

For now, if you like the idea of your system being immutable (sorta), then make sure to try out Fedora Silverblue, or Fedora Kinoite if you prefer KDE.

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Thanks for reading! I wish you a good rest of the day, evening, night, or whatever other time you're reading this!