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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I haven’t adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.

    When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I’d just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.



  • I recommend using whatever is the “least hands-on” option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don’t mess with it, I think you’ll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.

    Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I’ve personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you’re looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you’re doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.


  • This is, IMO, the biggest yet least obvious advantage of immutable systems. A traditional Linux environment is “just as safe” as the immutable setups, if only the user/administrator is perfect, never makes a mistake, and always makes the right decisions for now and the future.

    Given reality tends to differ from the above, having a system that, at a bare minimum, provides you the “oh shit go back” button to system-level changes, and at best provides a clear, reproducible, trail of actions, is a huge advantage for long-term stability for all users, experienced or not. I’ve been through the school of hard knocks far too many times maintaining everything from server setups to gaming desktops the traditional way, and have committed to “early adopting” immutable distros for pretty much everything except the gaming setup (given the whole suite of proprietary and out-of-date/out-of-touch applications that are basically necessary in that space and not-fully-compatible with the sandboxes and abstraction layers necessary).