Hey Astronauts, hope you’re having a fantastic week so far and forward to have a great weekend.
Yesterday I’ve been reading some about immutable distros. It peeked my interest the idea of having a “set it and forget it” system where updates couldn’t nuke it. However, after reading about some of the most popular ones it sparked doubts that maybe some of you veterans/more knowledgeable people can answer.
So far my understanding is that the key points of these are: System files are untouched, preventing system breakage with updates. It uses mostly flatpaks to get software and it has rollbacks built-in without the need of timeshift or snapshots.
Aside from the specific use of conteinerization that you might need and/or the specific use of “installing this here as a gaming PC in the living room” - for daily usage, is there any clear advantage or something one might actually need?
For example, with the premise of the key points above, let’s say you want this for your grandma or non-tech savvy family member (sister, mom, uncle, whatever). How different or better would this be over say something like Linux Mint? It’s already very usable and stable. It’s a deb/ubuntu derivative so it doesn’t get updated every Sunday. This other person using the computer will likely not be installing programs if you set it up for everything from the get-go, so this wouldn’t be an issue or potential breaking point and even then, if you wanted the sandboxing or assuring that “it just works” you might as well install things from Flatpaks too instead of the .deb packages.
Note: I said Mint as an example where Arch / Arch based could be more prone to breaking and/or needing much more on-top assistance.
At least to me, for daily usage, it doesn’t make much sense aside from the built-in rollback but perhaps I could be missing something.
What is your take on it, or am I understanding this pretty much correctly? Thank you
It’s a forward thinking thingy, conceptually: we don’t need to maintain any stinking packages and updates will no longer hurt. The bulletproof aspect is tempting.
Personally I don’t want to hang out where they don’t maintain their own packages, I don’t want to go to Flatpak for everything, that seems ludicrous, and rolling release has worked out fine for me.
Imho immutable is inevitable for mass adoption. That doesn’t mean it will be used by everybody, but if Linux on the desktop will ever break into mass adoption by casual users it will be on immutable (see e.g. Android or SteamOS).
Choose a Base: Start with an Arch Linux ISO or one of the immutable distributions.
Set Up BTRFS: During installation, format your partitions with BTRFS.
Create Snapshots: Use tools like snapper to manage snapshots.
Configure Read-Only: Set the root filesystem to read-only using commands like chattr +i /
Conclusion:
By using BTRFS snapshots or opting for an existing immutable distribution, you can effectively create an immutable Arch Linux system. This setup is ideal for users seeking stability and ease of maintenance.
From what i read endeavour is planning to add it ?
For me it’s mainly because flatpaks/snap, etc are HUGE compared to a locally installed binary. I get the supposed reliability of the core OS being immutable but in reality, I have had zero issue that I have not caused myself, with “normal” Linux distros over the last nearly 20 years. Are immutable distros a solution in search of a problem? Maybe not but I am not interested.
This is a good point, something so “rock solid” even normal people couldn’t mess up.
However, I don’t know if I entirely agree due to Flatpaks (and other formats) have their own issues, such as “permissions” and other things that have issues as well. To be honest, I feel this would be what we would want, considering even on Mac or Windows, stuff has “little” to “big” issues all the time as well. But maybe since people are not used to Linux, any new “small issue” would be blown up out of proportion.
I know you did this with AI and is not entirely off-base, however, yesterday when reading about the rollback feature I was looking specifically for information on why that would be better than timeshift or snapshots with btrfs.
Apparently (and people can correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t know the technical details) this being built-in is also safeguarded by the immutability, while timeshift and snapshots is something that happens “after” a failure and could have some issues as well.
Aside from that I feel on a daily basis, the hassle of dealing with Flatpaks that could arise would be worse than just installing a debian/ubuntu based distro. But I could be wrong.
Yep, there are still issues. Disclaimer: I’m more plugged in on the KDE side of things than the broader Linux ecosystem
They are aware about the rough edges. Here’s a talk from a KDE core dev:
Also KDE’s upcoming, new Linux distro is going to heavily rely on Flatpak as the currently most popular 3rd party app ecosystem: https://kde.org/linux/
I would think all your necessary base tools like ffmpeg, pipewire, etc etc would have to be maintained by the Immutable Distro though…you couldn’t have a third party maintaining the underneath stuff. Or maybe you could? I don’t know.
I love KDE, it’s my DE of choice. I will have to check that video out later, since it’s 40 mins long but sounds interesting.
Edit: Could you give me the TLDW? It’s 40 minutes and the visual aid is non-existent. It’s just 40 minutes of him talking lol. For a technical talk, it’s a bit too much even for me and I like long form content. But I do need a switch. Also to help me visualize what’s being said.
I did check out the page yesterday for the new KDE distro. I was excited, however it seems to be super early now and it’s also basically a dev-playground or more for “testing KDE”.
In general, so far, there has not been a single distro or upstream “selling point” that made me say “Yes I will ditch EndeavourOS”.
Aren’t those maintained by their own devs/maintainers and then packaged all into a distro? When an immutable distro updates is as a whole pacakge, at least as far as I’ve seen, I would assume they don’t really have to “maintain” anything, just making sure the new updates don’t blow things up or cause major issues. I guess we could call “maintenance” to that too
It’s just that you don’t look at the system as a completely ordinary user
I’ve been tinkering with openSUSE Kalpa in a virtual machine for several months. If you look at the system the way my wife looks at it, for example, everything is very good and very simple
Which immutable distro? People talk about immutable distros like they are a single thing but they are wildly different and for completely different use cases. For example, Nixos, Fedora Silverblue and VanillaOS are all immutable but they are completely different in both technical construction and daily use.
