Debunking 7 Myths About Immutable Linux Distros

Immutable Linux distros are this fangled way of using Linux and as one might expect it comes with it's detractors even for things that aren't real problems

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#Linux #LinuxDesktop #OpenSource #FOSS #SteamDeck #Fedora

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[dczoekj]

Windows 10 did that years ago, after update all your settings get reverted, especially the telemetry ones, this makes it immutable and far ahead of all the cool new immutable distros.

[milohoffman]

Once software devs get used to it and people like KDE don't assume they can make random changes to /usr, most people will never know they are on an immutable distro. It's just going to take a awhile for some software devs to follow proper practices.

[ehllie]

I was honestly expecting NixOS to be mentioned. I feel like it has most of the issues mentioned here solved with it's package model, and is almost 20 years old now so it's not really that experimental anymore.

[fuseteam]

Image-based is likely what we should call it, os updates are image based.

This could also open possibilities; package managers are currently archive/package based but what if package managers were image-based? Distri is researching this

[formbi]

I've been using Guix on my laptop for over two years now and with the exception of some software availability issues (not unthinkable at all on a niche distro) it's been absolutely fantastic. The rollbacks saved my butt a few times and there were some situations with Arch on my desktop when I wanted to actually replace it with Guix (but didn't due to games and stuff, i.e. software availability). I even manage many packages on Arch with Guix because the build process is much more robust and prevents weird crashes and stuff.

[ivolol]

Always love the whiteboard jokes. They don't always 100% hit the mark but love the effort that's always there.

[PhilKulak]

You can get all the AUR packages you want if you use distrobox, btw. I’ve even installed Steam that way because the flatpak was too old.

[AmirHosseinHonardust]

Also brodie, take a look at nixos's repos. You will be genuinely surprised at the vastness of stuff available there.

[simondewaal]

I'm using Nixos right now, still have some things that I have to get my head around, but it looks promising. Configure window managers and some desktop environments have a steep learning curve while installing for example a virtualization environment with KVM is a breeze in comparison to other Linux distro's. This is also the case for installing steam and OBS. Enabling auto updates and cleaning up the system is also easy to do. The problem with NIXOS is to use it with more then 10% of it's potential possibilities. I'm a desktop user, not a developer, but I like NIXOS for it's rollback and reproducibility features and the massive amount of packages to install.

[johnwestervelt]

The immutable OS shortcoming I, a non-techie retired guy, see at this point- at least for my use as a home desktop system - is getting printer and scanner drivers/driverless drivers to consistently connect with apps that utilize them. My wish list includes thorough documentation to help us learn how to find the drivers and connect them to flatpak apps. Neither flatpak or current immutable distros I've tried do this in their documentation adequately at this point.

[that_leaflet]

6:52 Note that sudo rm- rf will still break silverblue, at least in version 36. Version 37 makes some changes in this regard, but I'm not sure if it still breaks your system.

[hiimshort]

After having used it for nearly a year, NixOS has become the gold standard for any operating system. It solves so many problems far too elegantly. It wasn't mentioned in the video, but I hope that means there is a follow up ;)

[NOPerative]

Immutable distros are the future.
When all the wrinkles get ironed out you'll be looking at a system that's virtually unbreakable, more secure due to isolation and clearly defined policy, capable of rollbacks out the box, highly configurable using an overlay system and supporting use case using containerization. Quite honestly, Linux will become the perfect operating system; the model Linux is targeting with the immutable format is essentially what was intended as the perfect operating system from the start for all operating systems. This immutable system layout proves my argument (PoC) that the Linux community is actually a scientific R&D community rather than emmo belly achers hating on Windows and MacOS. My assumptions that Linux would have a profound impact on the general computing community and that commercial operating systems should also take notes and evolve in like has also begun to unfold (WSL and MS Linux to name a few examples).

Linux is bigger than anyone thinks it is and its not a niche OS most just live in ignorance of what they're actually a part of - evolution.
At any rate, good vid; I missed this one somehow as it is 11 months old at this point, but it is still relevant and addresses some really good bullets.

[ArmiaKhairy]

I haven't tried it myself, but I believe this can be a bigger pain for installing drivers that wasn't in the kernel, especially with secure-boot.

[silverywingsagain]

This reminds me a lot of how custom ROMs work on Android. There's a whole ecosystem of images based on the Android Open Source Project customized to suit all kinds of different users. Updating these OS images is incredibly easy and they're generally super modular. In the event that you need to make changes to the system image there are tools that let you do so safely and/or systemlessly.

I think one of the greatest advantages of this type of OS is the read-only nature of the system files. This makes it ideal for portable or battery powered devices which may need to be switched off without notice or have power failure.

[mskiptr]

/usr was never meant to be writable by random programs!
And not even by your regular users nor the system administrator. Heck, it used to be standard practice to mount it read-only (e.g. from some shared network storage) and update it out-of-band

/usr is designed to be managed by _the distribution_ and /usr/local by the local admin. If programs really want to somehow manage themselves, /opt is the way to go

Now, how are 'immutable' distros different then? They try to be declarative (and not stateful) on the system level.
That is, instead of treating /usr, /etc and so on, as a bunch of files you modify to make changes, they try to provide you with them as a product of whatever configuration you chose.

The simplest case is a read-only, image based system. Steam Deck uses it, Android does too and in general your only choice of system-level configuration here is picking a different ROM and flashing it.

Then there are overlay-based distros. You have a base system and then you modify it to suit your needs. However, instead of tweaking system files directly, each change you issue is remembered individually and the resulting file-level modifications may also be stored as file-system overlays – you see them all in one place (at the final mount point), yet previous version are also available if you remove the new overlay.
This is kinda what Docker does

Finally there these distros which can manage several system configurations in parallel. When you update your packages the new files do not replace the old ones, but are instead installed alongside the earlier versions.
This can be achieved by never installing any package globally in the first place. Instead of putting everything in a global /usr prefix, you compile it and install to directories like

/etc on the other hand can be programmatically generated from your system config file

This is how NixOS and GNU Guix do things. It allows for some amazing features, but can also be quite incompatible with your regular software that either assumes it itself is in /usr or assumes where to look for any of its dependencies

[Paul-pu]

Been using silverblue 39. Its really fantastic and stable. You can use the default toolbox to install most fedora native apps but i use flatpaks for most things. I use developer tools and ides in their own toolbox. If i have to compile from source i use its own container.... and then delete the container when im done with the build. Really helps cut down on the bloat of your system by keeping all the -devel pakages seperate from your system.

[androth]

i like the idea of immutable systems and i used fedora silvberblue for a while. ultimately stopped using it because of nvidia issues, however i did learn a lot from it and i have slowly porting some of what i learned to a regular rolling distro, which in my case is opensuse tumbleweed.
the lessons learned are to basically containerize most of what you do and keep the base system packages to a minimum.
so i only use zypper to install system/driver/core packages that i want.
for everything else, i use flatpacks/appimages/snaps
toolbox to create a containerized OS that has access to my home directory (for software development and testing)
the NIX package manager.
if there is something i need that isn't available anywhere else, compile from source and install it in the home directory.
there are various other options, but i have enough.

and of course, opensuse by default has snapshots that you can revert to if anything goes wrong at any stage.

[anon_y_mousse]

On the actual subject of immutable distros. Back around 20-ish years ago I used Knoppix, which you probably know is a live distro which you could burn to a CD. I had a Win98 computer back then and sort of triple booted with both of those and Slackware which I installed on a second hard drive. I used Knoppix for about a year without rebooting just to play with it and see if I could. It was kind of cool what you could do with it while having an entire OS on a single CD. The beauty of Linux is that any distro can be immutable, if you want it to be, and you can still do everything with it that you can do with any other OS.

[jeremyandrews]

It is worth making a distinction here IMO, because there REALLY IS such a thing as an immutable OS in the sense people would imagine, like some early computers had a copy of DOS or BASIC in ROM that you could never change. There are still use cases for something like that in an embedded system, but if that's not what you are going for, then immutable could be misleading. The few people in a situation where a literally immutable OS would be useful already have solutions to that problem and know exactly what they are doing.