Motivation Opportunity is upon us! For the past few years, the desktop Linux user base has been growing at a historically high rate. StatCounter currently has us at 4.14% desktop OS market share for Q2 2025. For comparison, when Fedora Workstation was first released in Q4 2014, desktop Linux was at 1.38%. Now, StatCounter measures...
I’d love to think so too, but I think our echo chamber is pretty tight.
I certainly think they’re ready for mainstream usage (I have one Bazzite install myself), but I don’t think there’s significant awareness beyond the dedicated fan base.
There aren’t really any actually useful metrics that I know of, but the only one of the 3 I’ve mentioned that broke into distrowatch’s top 100 is Bazzite, and that’s only in the last few months.
And for legal threats: I doubt any court in any country will give credence to that. Fedora is MIT licensed.
The legal threats were credible and resulted in yet more wasted developer time removing that package instead of the entire useless repo.
You’re forgetting that millions of Steam Deck consoles have been sold and all of them are flathub exclusive.
On top of that you have: Mint, Vanilla OS, Endless OS, OpenMandriva, PopOS!, Clear Linux, PureOS, ZorinOS, KDE Neon, GNOME OS, Salix, and many others all shipping flathub by default.
Fedora is in a very exclusive group of distros dumb enough to ship their own flatpak repo.
Bringing up Distrowatch stats and “Echo chamber” in the same comment is the most absurd thing I’ve seen this year.
I think he was referring to immutable distros not being mainstream, not flatpaks.
That’s irrelevant to this conversation
What? He said “in order to go mainstream”, referring to immutable distros like bazzite.
Bazzite is not immutable, and SteamOS is as mainstream as it gets while being A/B root immutable.
All of them ship Flathub because it’s ready for public consumption.
If the attempt here is to argue that cloud native isn’t mainstream and change topics from flathub, you are proudly in a bubble of 3% of the computing industry while your peers in the Linux server space and Android run circles around you.
Pretty sure bazzite is immutable, it is based on silverblue after all. But that’s besides the point, i just wanted to point out that you probably misunderstood what he was saying. Immutable distros being mainstream kinda depends on how you look at it i suppose. Purely in terms of amount of users, with steamos and bazzite being so popular, i guess you could consider it mainstream, but how many people actually choose a distro because it is immutable? Steamos just happens to ship with the steam deck, bazzite is popular because it mimicks steamos for other devices, and if you look at something else like NixOS, it’s more about the system being declarative rather than immutable. It’s probably safe to say that flatpak is the most popular third party package manager though, i do agree with that.
You are arguing with Bazzite’s primary maintainer. “Immutable” is a bit of a misnomer, especially since multiple directories like /etc are read/write.
Ah i see, i had no idea lol. In that case i stand corrected since he probably knows better than i do. I think the term immutable is causing a lot of confusion, because i also see a lot of other sources online label bazzite as immutable. And then ofcourse there are other projects that use the term composable, or atomic. I guess i fell victim to that confusion as well now.