You should spend some time in immutable Linux land, you might like it. When starting my PhD I got handed a laptop and told to set it up. At the time I chose OpenSUSE Aeon as I was familiar with Tumbleweed. This was a fantastic choice and for the kind of work I do and I don’t regret it. Removing the burden of system administration is a value I can get behind and I think it really paid off.

Each day I get a notification to reboot to update. The system has been updated automatically and it is waiting for me. Each day I ignore it and I know that tomorrow I will boot into the updated system and it will just work. Nothing is lost or non functional. Ever.

Getting software was extremely easy because Flatpak is integrated within the software portal. Day to day life is uneventful as everything I really need I have. The apps I need (Emacs, Firefox, Zotero) are packaged and automatically updated. I can even use my wonky extensions setup without too much hassle.

Distrobox has been my workhorse, mostly unnoticed which is good, and the only time I had to install something on the host system was to get virtualization to work. I could figure it out before the deadlines for artifact review went by so another win.

Other apps I got are Flatseal and Warehouse because truly Flatpak is a bit too much to handle sometimes. If I didn’t care to have a dead-simple, reproducible, can’t-break-it setup I would have used distrobox’s export feature. Anything installed in a container managed by distrobox is also available from the host launcher. Truly magical.

But I did care about dead-simple, reproducible, can’t-break-it setup so I have packaged even more apps and I am happy with the result. This is the first time that I have a disaster recovery plan for my system and my data and I am confident that it will work.

The most important endorsement I can give to this way of life was reading Aeon: openSUSE for the lazy developers when it came out in June 2024 and thinking “I have used a release-candidate all this time without an issue. I didn’t even notice it .”.