Opinions on immutable distros

3 years ago by Footnote2669 to c/linux

Hey! I’m currently on Fedora Workstation and I’m getting bored. Nothing in particular. I’ve heard about immutable distros and I’m thinking about Fedora Kinoite. The idea is interesting but idk if it’s worth it. CPU and GPU are AMD. Mostly used for gaming.

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Guenther_Amanita 34 points 3 years ago

I see many people here wondering, why they should consider an immutable system.
As someone, who thought the same a few months ago, and now chose Silverblue, here are reasons why:

Atomic updates: never worry about half applied installations anymore. Either your OS updates successfully, or it will just work like before.
Less bugs and better security: every install is the same, so devs can fix one bug or exploit, recreatable on every system.
Automatic updates (configurable): they get downloaded by the way, without you noticing. And if you reboot anyway, you boot into your updated OS. No waiting times. The system manages itself.
Way harder to break
Changes are easily undoable: if an update breaks anything, you can just select another image and reboot, without recovering anything.
No junk accumulation over time, the OS is kept clean
Clear distinction between "your" stuff and the OS
You can "swap out" the base OS cleanly and keep your stuff. Want KDE? No need to reinstall, just paste one command and delete everything Gnome-related, and you are now on Kinoite.
Flexibility: choose between dozens of different images, like one that replicates SteamOS or Ubuntu, has the MS Surface kernel build in, offers Hyprland, and so on...
And much more!

My #1 reason is, that everything is worry free.

Those advantages above don't apply to "normal" OSs, even, if I keep everything in Distrobox and Flatpaks.

Immutable OSs aren't called "The future of Linux" without reason. They usually shouldn't impair anyone, and make the whole Linux ecosystem better in any aspect.

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lemmyvore 16 points 3 years ago

I'm sorry but none of the above sound different from a regular distro. Maybe I haven't got the gist. You can have snapshots and atomic updates on a regular distro, you don't have to reinstall to switch from Gnome to KDE, I can install all kinds of stuff cleanly anyway thanks to package managers, I don't use root often so the system files are effectively read-only as far as I'm concerned, and so on.

As far as security is concerned I don't see the big deal, I mean I get why a read-only OS would in theory be harder to break into but it can still be modified for updates so I guess it's not really "immutable" after all.

What am I missing?

Edit: before anybody points it out, I do know about the rebase layers and I think it's an interesting approach, but ultimately still gets the same results as packages. It may be helpful for distro builders but doesn't make much difference as a user.

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Guenther_Amanita 8 points 3 years ago

You're correct. But, and here's the big but, the whole immutability-thing isn't something the user should be worried about at all.

On Android for example, the system is read-only too, and pretty much nobody cares too, because it was always designed this way and it doesn't inhibit functionality.

It is mainly a big pro for developers in how I see it. See, every installation creates some package drift. One dependency here, one extra program there, no problem.

But in sum, there will accumulate hundreds of "bloat"-packages over the years, which add many unknown vulnerabilities and bugs that are completely individual to your setup.
And then it will begin: a program crashes here, there's your black screen, and every dev on the issue report says " closed, can't replicate". And after an OS-reinstall, it works again.

And if you want to install KDE on Pop!OS for example, it is highly individual and there are still some packages you didn't see, and it will be very buggy. Some buttons that are misalligned, misconfigured drivers, and so on.
I tried changing the DE on my normal Fedora one time and even though I thought I did everything correct, I had to reinstall due to screen tearing/ flickering, many misconfigurations, and so on.

On Silverblue, it's a process of 5 minutes max, and then my setup will be the same as the one from thousand other people.

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Sentau 0 points 3 years ago

Yes you can do all this with regular distros but not as conveniently. Especially cleanly switching from gnome to kde and vice versa is a nightmare. And by switching I mean removing one completely(including dependencies) and installing the other.

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