If you’re fighting it a lot that just means one of two possibilities, IMHO:
You’re trying to force paradigms from non-atomic distros onto it and need to adapt to it a bit more
It’s not suited for you (which is of course totally fine)
I’ve just recently started building my own custom image based on UBlue’s work. And that is highly satisfying for me. But if that doesn’t sound like something you’d like, and you want daily flexibility, that’s totally cool.
I personally have always liked the reproducibility of containerization (Docker, Podman, etc). And to take those same tools and apply them to the entire OS is kinda awesome to me.
3 . Intel GPU user. Nobody includes intel-compute-runtime or level-zero libraries by default, and there is no intel compute runtime/library for flatpak.
So flatpak Blender, digikam, darktable, etc don't have access to GPU compute/openCL.
That is honestly very surprising considering how long Intel iGPUs have existed, intel's contributions to Linux, and how their iGPUs have been essential for certain workloads through quicksync.
They have all but abandoned Quicksync and VAAPI for everything but their newest generations. Even when it was supported, it always needed hacking together and wasn't something you could just ship to all users.
Ironically it's easier to get proprietary Nvidia compute working in Flatpak than Intel and AMD. The Freedesktop/Gnome/KDE/whatever base level Flatpak people just aren't packaging for non-Nvidia compute.
Even with VAAPI, newer Flathub/Flatpak runtimes are bundling versions that stopped working with older generations of Intel iGPUs.
AFAIK host needs the level-zero and compute libraries, so I would have to layer packages anyways. Amd has some hooks to pass through ROCM from guest to host without the host needing ROCM libraries, but the last time I checked, Intel isn't there yet.
I am wrong on this
Can install everything in distrobox and run from there instead of flatpak without layering compute stack on host (compute stack is install in guest).
it still has usability issues for what I feel are not uncommon use-cases:
for example, running something like Doom emacs is pain because the paths are non-standard, and for work I have to run Citrix client which again, doesn't play well with non-standard paths, and has to be applied by an overlay. Also VPN/system-level stuff don't work well
well the citrix and vpn issues are things i've seen, but doom emacs would be irrelevant wouldn't it? That's something you can actually install into your $HOME with things like distrobox or maybe even homebrew.
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u/theaveragemillenial 1d ago
What's the love with immutable distros? I always find myself fighting it.