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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 19th, 2023
  • miscing@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.world•What are immutable distros, and are they the future of Linux?
    3·
    1 year ago

    Immutable systems do not “lock you out of changes you might want to do that aren’t official”, even if steamOS specifically does.

    Microos and coreos both allow package layering client side. There is also features landing allowing “unlocking” the read-only filesystem.

    More importantly, coreos now allows using Containerfile to customize the distro server side, and then all your computers can pull the same image (with all your hard work stored in the registry, and reapplied via the Containerfile and some cicd). It’s certainly a very different and new workflow and there is a lack of tools user facing tools, but that is always the case with new tech.

    The workflow I would sell you on is this:

    • “unlock” system (allowing non-persistent changes)
    • test everything works as you would like
    • apply same changes via Containerfile
    • Enjoy all your computers automatically updating to this and all your hard work being stored permanently in a registry.

    This is a simplification and in practice currently a lot of things are hard to accomplish this way (say bootloader changes). But that is the “goal”, and after running highly customized distros for a decade, I at least would love to be able to have all my changes in all my (present and future) computers without the hassle that brings currently

  • miscing@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.world•What are immutable distros, and are they the future of Linux?
    2·
    1 year ago

    Because I forgot one of the most important features: true automatic updates with auto-revert. Reproducible OS’s are updated in the background and the updates don’t take effect until you reboot. This means you can finally safely update the OS. And if something fails, the bootloader can autorevert to the previous working version.

    This is more impactful in server world. In your personal computer you update packages and most of the time “everything is fine”, if it’s not you reboot. But accurately knowing which packages require a reboot has been a long standing problem, which reproducible OS now fix by just not doing that. In server world an update breaking things can take time to find and can affect multiple machines at the same time. The stakes are higher to make sure updates are stable.