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.
My understanding is “immutable” is a bit of a misnomer and avoids the “point” of using these distros.
“Layered Distros” is a better terminology, where you can imagine the OS as multiple layers, and you can swap 1 layer out for another without modifying the others and still have a functional operational machine.
Now some of those layers have to be immutable ones at runtime for this concept to work, so thats where that part of the name comes from, but thats an implicit result from the actual point/use case of these distros, not the selling point.
So you can swap versions/releases of your OS very cleanly at boot, without modifying userland, and it will continue to function just the same. This lets you do stuff at the admin level like broadly releases a version update merely by having users just reboot their machines, and next time they boot up their machine will now be running on the new OS layer, with their local “user” layer being unchanged.
They also separate concerns better than classical distros. Executable binaries & libraries are separate from configuration which is separate from data. It makes backups much simpler, makes configuring new machines easier than something like Ansible, etc.
I especially look forward to replacing Ansible :)
Tried to do so with Guix though and I have to say I found it quite difficult, but I hope it catches on and becomes easier to use.
My understanding is that most immutable distributions store the root filesystem in a read-only partition separate from userspace. If you want to install something that would modify this partition, it is applied temporarily until reboot. On reboot, the operating system attempts to resolve your changes, and if they break something it will reject them.
Each OS might implement immutability differently, but I believe that’s the general idea. macOS is another example of an immutable operating system, as of Big Sur.
Read only root and was they way unix was installed for decades. Some things, like nfs roots, somewhat rely on it (multiple machines would run a single static install of unix, with user partitions being mounted on demand on each machine).
People don’t like dealing with partitions though so modern distros tend towards a single root paritition with everything in it. It’s funny to go back to the old way.
TheLinuxExperiment has a good video about it: https://tilvids.com/w/3RjSzdS9jjK2y1nP3M6oJD
