For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
You know, there was Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided to transform regular machines into MIPS-style shitty devices that have a read-only OSes and a separate partition for configs. :D
Yeah I’m with you, I want more reliability but immutable is a bit of a long way to go to get it.
I get why people are willing to make the tradeoff though, docker taught us os configuration should be done programmatically, my workflow is just used to constantly fidgeting things till they feel right, to each their own.
I worked at the big cloud guys, I get the point.
But this isn’t a cloud host, this is a workstation that I’m happily tinkering with, I enjoy bending and breaking the os for fun and development.
My data is usually not on the workstation, so clearly it out is no real loss, and I get to experiment more.
TBF the unix model originally was read only mounted / and /usr - typically in a separate partition - so they were immutable for decades. It’s only later when home users started using single partition models that that really broke.
But the separation is built right in… /etc for config, /home for user stuff, etc. so there’s really no need for another layer… it’s not like windows were it’s common to store the configuration in the same directory as the binaries… so not really seeing what the current fad is about. Presumably something will come out of it, maybe even a standard…
I love Universal Blue.
It’s OCI cloud image based Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite/Serica with extra steps/batteries included.
“The reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop.”
But also probably an easier way for Nvidia Fedora users to game on Linux:
Easily roll back deployments or 📌 one and rebase to something else easy peasy. (So many different choices) Test betas with no fear!
I’ve actually been gaming on Bazzite for two weeks now:
Jorge’s Blog:
Media:
- High-Tech Lo-Life on YouTube:
- “As Seen on TechSpot”
- “As Seen on GamingOnLinux”
- “As Seen on tom’sHARDWARE”
If you wanna simply make your own image to share with friends/family:
Universal Blue isn’t a distro. It’s more of a reimplementation/enhancement of Immutable OCI Cloud Based Images of Fedora.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=aaeRk8_i1Ds
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
People literally made a distro spin that’s dedicated to rolling back nvidia drivers.
Classic nvidia moment right there.
But Universal Blue does look very interesting, I need to try and use it with distrobox and see if I can hit any walls that aren’t there with a classic setup.
It does take some adjusting- the pitfalls you’d encounter with Distrobox on Universal Blue are the same as Distrobox on any other distro, so first I’d say to try moving your workflow to Flatpak and Distrobox on your current system or a VM and see how it works out. Generally Flatpak is preferred to a rootless Distrobox which is preferred to a rootful one, but sometimes there’s not a Flatpak for something (especially command line tools) and you need access to hardware or system level stuff that only a rootful one can do properly.
Flatpaks are already my preferred way of installing random crap, but I did run into a few walls with that. VSCodium for example is unusable because it throws random errors about running out of space or not finding files that are definitely there even after giving it all the permissions via flatseal.
Proton has a similar thing where windows apps don’t detect the amount of free space properly and see 4GB instead, so I guess it’s inherent to containers.
I’ll definitely try distrobox on my arch machine, is there anything I need to consider beforehand to not shoot myself in the foot?
uBlue is great. After using Fedora Silverblue for more than a year I used it to have the same OS on my laptop and desktop. It’s works great and is quite simple if your already familiar with building containers. But the constant reboots and rebuilding an image taking minutes made me switch to NixOS.
The advantage of uBlue over NixOS is imo that the former is configured like any other Linux by placing files in the traditional file system hierarchy (e.g. binaries in /usr/local/bin). NixOS throws most of that over board and makes use of it’s own configuration language and package manager. Getting started with uBlue is definitely easier, while NixOS is a time-consuming rabbit hole (not that uBlue isn’t…). For a tiling wm setup I definitely think NixOS is the better choice, since changing core system components is quicker.
Security, Stability
Honestly every time I mention NixOS I get someone telling me it’s not a beginner friendly distro
Provided you get to understand the config file which only took a day of fiddling it’s so much easier to use than mutable distros
I add something to my package list and it just works, and nothing else breaks and even if I do manage to screw up my entire system so badly that I can’t boot it anymore I just boot the last working configuration and undo my changes
I believe people have even built UIs around the config to make it more user friendly
https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui https://github.com/vlinkz/nix-software-center
I agree, when I was on other distributions I would gradually customize things until something broken; then it was easier to start from scratch than to fix my mistakes. With NixOS it still gives me the ability to tinker with things, but makes it much easier than starting from scratch when I inevitably mess it up.
Immutable distros are locked-down versions of the traditional operating systems. Literally.
In the normal traditional world, you can use the package manager to remove python as a system package and all its dependencies if you so wished. You could rm -rf / too.
With immutable, the whole filesystem is on ro mode. Every system program that a user needs is bundled by the OS and no other changes can be made without breaking the model.
This model of having the OS immutable means less chances of malware getting persistence, high systems availability and reproducible environments since the OS controls the state of the versions available and makes this state available to all users of the distro.
