Very true.

I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software …

1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve)

2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub

3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default

4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort.

Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.

I'm convinced that some day bootc (or something similar) will be exactly what I'm looking for, but not yet.

My issue with Silverblue is that the unix exosystem was meant to be deeply collaborative ecosystem for programs. Meaning each program doing one thing and communicating with each other through various IPC mechanisms. Atomic systems with containers broke that.

Like I’ve created a rough media player with curl, jq, mpv powered by my subsonic server. The same issues happens with my emacs config which depends on various utilities. Yes I could create a main toolbox for all of that, but the whole thing was a bit cumbersome.

When I do want proper isolation, I create a VM.