this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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It's definitely getting there.
I found the regular Fedora SilverBlue install did not give enough flexibility to be very usable. The suggestion to just use toolkits is not for mortals. I copied Bazzite and installed homebrew (coming from Mac, that's comfortable). Brew solved 95% of the pain.
The next annoying 4% was stuff that doesn't work well with flatpack: Steam, gamescope, password managers, etc.
Then there's a final 1% of the masses of content written about Fedora using rpm and dnf that just kinda doesn't work. Makes stuff like following a build guide or install steps a little bit more annoying.
The really nice thing about it though is I was able to switch between different fedora environments and bazzite with relatively little pain. Nothing really broke, which was great.
If the future of the desktop is linux, it needs immutable distros to get really good. Personally, I wouldn't want to go back to fully-root-editable linux, but I also do not blame the folks (who want to) to be able to nuke systemd and Wayland (which both do too much for my taste) and do their own thing.
I 100% agree with you. I think atomic distros are great for people like my parents, where they just need a browser and maybe libreoffice, and it's valuable to have something that "just works" (now I need to just convince them to give linux it a try...)
If you start getting into coding or customization then it quickly becomes clunky to use and requires knowledge beyond what a beginner would have, especially because most guides will tell you to use the traditional package manager, but that won't work with immutable root.
Containers, installing software to /home, changing advanced settings is in my experience way too much for most people.
I hope though that this might be solvable in the future with flatpak. Maybe by creating some special category for "CLI tools" with less/no sandboxing but still installable and runnable from a normal user account, and shipping the whole dependency tree.
Overall, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.
I am also not convinced that it was ever meant as the endgame. Like,
toolboxstill doesn't offer a mechanic to upgrade a(ll) container(s) without entering one. The last time I used it, it also shat itself whenever the old pet container became EOL and desired a 'system update' to become functional. IIRC,distroboxdoesn't fare any better at this. Thus, coming with what looks like planned obsolescence; with the recreation of the pet containers every couple of months as a result. I suppose the solution is picking an image that's supposed to be rolling-release. Which is why I think this workflow suits Aeon better.