In this case it’s referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it’s a bit buzzwordy, but it’s not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s understandable if effort needs to be focused on a single good UI widget ecosystem fully under Mozilla’s control, rather than living by the whims of the three major desktop UI toolkits they have to support, as well as the hundreds of thousands of web pages that are exclusively designed and tested against Chrome which already has been using non-native widgets across desktop platforms for a very long time. I’m not in the web dev space anymore, but I’d constantly see sites built that were incredibly dependent on the exact pixel sizes of widgets as they would render in Chrome, and would visually fall apart on Firefox, or with other zoom/text size settings.
UI design across Windows, macOS, and Linux GNOME/KDE have converged enough that it’s probably good-enough if Firefox continues down the path of just theming their own widgets with the OS/user’s color scheme where applicable, and calling it a day.
If I’m not literally touching the content I’m trying to scroll, I’ll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.
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.
For me it’s always been after I tried to resize a partition.
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.
The ideal end state is “why not both?”, I think. Have an immutable “base” system, and utilize mutable overlays on top for any necessary tinkering or involved activities.
Casual users need not interface with the overlays at all (or do so through very controlled mechanisms, like how Flatpak/Snap, Steam game containers, etc work today), while developers, tinkerers, and those that are curious can create throwaway environments that they can mess with to their heart’s content.
WSL on Windows has its warts, but it shows how such an ecosystem is possible (if you treat Windows itself as a Black Box That Must Not Be Modified). I think the immutable distro ecosystem is on the right track, with technologies like Toolbox/Distrobox to bridge the gap, it will just take time for the tooling, practices, and ecosystem around them to mature and not be as much of a hassle as they are today.
Today, I am running both immutable and non-immutable setups on various machines. My work computer (development) and gaming rig are on a traditional setup, as my specific development needs are not 100% compatible with a toolbox environment, and gaming-adjacent applications like Discord are slow to adapt to the needs of Flatpak containerization. I have a laptop that’s 100% just used for media consumption and shitposting, which is a good use case for immutable distros today and is running Fedora Kinoite.
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).
I can see the use case for someone who wants a single OS install on the Steam Deck that does gaming just about as well as SteamOS does, but has a more fleshed out desktop experience (or even just a different one). The linked article goes into detail on various desktop-focused developments within Bazzite that wouldn’t really make sense for Valve to prioritize in SteamOS itself.