What are immutable distros, and are they the future of Linux?
What are immutable distros, and are they the future of Linux?
tilvids.com
What are immutable distros, and are they the future of Linux?
29 comments
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love this guys videos, just watched this one earlier today
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As someone who runs 7 servers in different datacenters (including cloud, local, and 2 in my home rack), being able to test and update on one system, then push that update to all the others, is a dream. Immutability is a step in that process, since it prevents weirdness from creeping in between updates. My only gripe right now with the options is they all still feel bloated. I miss original Rancher. All I need is Docker/Podman, and maybe wireguard to string the servers together. Likewise, my data hoarder computers need only zfs and enough on top to link them safely (so, wireguard). If I could focus on 2 stacks that I can push out elsewhere easily, I would be soooo much happier. Sain immutability tools are honestly magical.
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Nick is probably my favorite Linux YouTuber. He seems to be the only one to understand that Linux has to look and feel sexy for new people to stay on board.
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Personally I'm not super into the idea of immutable Distros, they kind of feel like Phone or Game console operating systems due to being read-only and containerized.
I prefer being able to change stuff without it being overwritten in the next update which is one of my many complaints with the steam deck and it's immutable OS, the system is locked to read-only and even if you unlock it it'll get relocked and all your changes undone at the next update.
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It is actually pretty fine for steam deck. It's has to be a console like experience.
For a desktop os? not so much
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Well on my SteamDeck I wanted to install Portmaster for Adblocking and network filtering, and also wine because running Windows apps with a click on the Desktop > Opening Bottles and setting each one up before, Also wanted to switch KDE for Gnome because KDE sucks on a touch screen big time where Gnome is much more touch friendly. Also wanted to install neofetch as well but just ran it as a script to get what I needed. Yes I can disable the read-only and do it all anyway, it's not really locked down but because SteamOS doesn't respect or honor changes they'll just undo it whenever I update.
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The point is you don't need to change stuff. You tell the resulting state of the system, the system will generate that state for you.
You don't change some file somewhere, you change the pipewire settings in your configuration file and rebuild. You save your config to version control so you can recreate the exact copy of your system any time and on any computer by just letting it download the locked versions of all of the packages you have installed.
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Well back when I didn't know any better and would go through linux installations because I would break things but also because many of the "recommended linux distros" had problems (f*** you Canonical forcing buggy snaps onto us) I might've thought it was an awesome idea. But now that I know better (both how to not break stuff + fix things if they're broken, and know when people are recommending glitchy trash) it just feels more restrictive. Kind of like a game console, android phone, or S mode. It's not necessarily as restrictive as those things because you can turn it off and do what you want but the updates to the OS will almost never respect the changes you make, as I know from SteamOS.
Because I want to Install portmaster or create services to launch my own scripts on Boot without them being purged blindly by an update (just like How on Game consoles System updates will remove installed homebrew) I'm not into the idea of using immutable systems that lock you out of changes you might want to do that aren't official.
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At least in coreos. rpm-ostree let's you "layer" packages on top of the base image, so when you install the next update it will automatically install your packages on top. You get to have the cake and eat it too.
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How’s this different from Docker over LXC in terms of practicality?
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Docker and guis are not great friends. Docker containers are mainly for web services
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If a lot of people don't prefer immutable distributions, why are they made? I still don't understand who this is for.
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Colossal waste of developer time and system resources. No thanks. At that rate just port the whole userland to nodejs electron too.
29 comments
I hate YouTube videos.
If this was an article, it could be read quickly and with no annoying YouTube influencer in my face.
Or being forced to find a headset somewhere because my hearing is shit and I can't make out what they're saying (and don't get me started on the auto-generated sub's).
Also, not having ads waved in my face on YouTube is a plus.
Also, I read a lot faster than the average youtuber talks.
Some things benefit from video, but tech articles tend to not fall under that category.
The description is not written like a blog post, because it assumes the user will watch the video.
There is usually no point even reading it.
It's also on YouTube, but this link is not YouTube
Are we trying to make YouTube a generic word now?
Haha didn't even notice it was hosted somewhere else since I didn't click the link.
But the point is, videos have a lot of downsides and very few upsides. Sometimes it's good to get a visual explanation of something but more often than not, videos are designed to focus on the influencer and to be entertaining.
I just want to get to the information myself.