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?

  • @cerement@slrpnk.net
    46•10 months ago

    the whole concept of immutable is focused on stability and safety of your system – yes, it is still possible to break an immutable distro, but it’s a LOT harder and takes some actual effort – there’s also a few concepts wrapped up into the “immutable” phrasing:

    • immutable filesystem – the root filesystem is set as read only, updates are queued up and applied during an upgrade (some distros require a reboot, some don’t)
      • VanillaOS keeps two copies of the root system (ABroot), upgrades the inactive copy and then swaps them out
      • NixOS has everything defined in a master config file and keeps an archive of previous generations of the config file allowing you to boot into whichever generation you want
    • atomicity – updates are applied individually and checked, if the update breaks then it’s reverted to the previous working state (ie. you are never left with a borked system)
    • containerized apps – user space apps isolated or sandboxed in some way like Flatpaks or Docker containers or OCI so if they break, they don’t take anything else down with them
    • declarative systems – the whole system (and packages and configs) are defined (declared) in one master config file – back up that config file and if something happens to your system, you just need that one file to do a full rebuild (or make an identical copy of your system on another computer) – NixOS and GNU Guix are the two more well-known in this space
      • EDIT: minor side-effect of this is you can easily tell exactly what packages are installed on your system at any given time – no hunting through history or trying to remember what you installed last month when you were testing out video players
    • TipponEnglish
      4•10 months ago

      I like the idea of containerised apps, especially if you can have multiples of the same app.

      A few years ago, when I was pretty much fully on Windows, I used PortableApps to manage a few websites and their emails, and having a simple way to do the same thing is one of the few reasons I’m still stuck with Windows.

      On top of that, I like trying out new apps and programs, but uninstalling them doesn’t always get rid of the extras, like new dependencies.