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Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

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41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#41
post #7

Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.

I like the idea of ostree but having glanced at it, as a casual/intermediate user, it didn't seem as user-friendly as, say, Docker was (which a home user can learn in an afternoon). It wasn't obvious how to get to "Debian distro deployed as an ostree snapshot".

Is this one of those things designed for career sysadmins/system builders only?

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#42
post #29

I think the definition should be: Installing any number of packages, then removing them in any order, at any future point(s) in time, is equivalent to never having installed them at all. This leaves some distros out, but I feel like it’s the important part of the concept.

I like that. Maybe you could say the package collection forms a lattice, where there is only one state for any subset of packages no matter how you got there.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#43
post #7

Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.

I'm one year in and hell yes. I wonder if Red Hat realize what they have here. Not just in silverblue but in Fedora.

I read a quora answer that estimated the Windows OS development budget at around 18 billion dollars, based on salaries. Imagine if Red Hat invested 2bn into Fedora to make it the Firefox of the desktop OS world. Just a 10% share is very significant against Microsoft.

They've come so far with so little, on the back of thousands of open source packages. That money could be used to keep those projects alive, and to sponsor them while they're being developed. Red Hat employees are already involved in a lot of them.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#44
post #31
post #7

Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.

I found Silverblue to not be flexible enough for my person computers. Maybe I use Linux in a hacky way, not having write access to /usr or /bin or other folders drove me crazy about once every two weeks. For example, I was using a script written by an ubuntu user that was looking for a library with the name/location ubuntu puts it in. Fedora uses a different name for the library. My instinct here is to create a symbo…

Use toolbox and do all your CLI scripting there.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may already know this but you can play most Windows games using Proton via Steam and it works really, really well.

But what about Office, Adobe , Affinity?

Lutris has installers for those too, and Flatpak makes Lutris' installation a breeze. Those are propietary, but you have Krita, Only Office, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Blender...

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#46
> immutability is a lie, many parts of the systems are mutable, although I don't know how to describe this family with a different word (transactional something?).

In the case of Nix, it sounds like it's more focused on reproduce-ability? It sounds like I should be able to take the Nix configuration file, plop it on another computer, and get the same system (except, perhaps, for /home).

Some of the others sound more like existing tools that provide snapshot/rollback capability, just with different implementations.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#47
What these sort of introductions to immutable always fail to consider is the other side of the coin, image-based. I'm working on https://universal-blue.org/ along with many people much more skilled than me. We build OCI container images on top of vanilla Fedora Silverblue & many other editions with different desktops. Those images can then be booted to (or rather rebased to) using rpm-ostree. This is a more robust way of extending the system than layering, and the same changes can be easily benefited or inherited from by anyone. You can even make your own image really easily!

I think that VanillaOS and SUSE are working on similar things, but we're not an OS project, just a downstream from Fedora. Fedora's full support is underway but with what's already working perfectly our methods are already IME some of the most robust and easy ways of delivering Nvidia drivers for example.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#48
On the server-side, there's Bottlerocket OS [1] (Amazon). They use A/B partitions for upgrades, and the idea is that you just run containers for anything non-base. Boot containers are used to do custom configuration at boot, and host-container (or DaemonSet, if you run K8S) is used for long-running services.

[1] https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#49
post #7

Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.

For what reasons?

It's a combination of two things, open source packages have matured to a very stable level. Fedora uses very recent packages and it just works somehow because they've all become very good. So to keep a stable desktop system there is no more reason to use "sta(b)le" packages.

The other reason is snapshots, because no system is perfect. An operating system should in fact be designed around the fact that something will go wrong. Windows has had this for years, and some linux users have done it with btrfs.

But Fedora Silverblue does it seamlessly with ostree and grub, so if something does go wrong in a newly applied update, you simply choose the last working one in the grub menu and go on with your day until you have time to resolve it.

This for me to use Fedora as my daily driver is crucial.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#50
post #7

Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.

I'm one year in and hell yes. I wonder if Red Hat realize what they have here. Not just in silverblue but in Fedora. I read a quora answer that estimated the Windows OS development budget at around 18 billion dollars, based on salaries. Imagine if Red Hat invested 2bn into Fedora to make it the Firefox of the desktop OS world. Just a 10% share is very significant against Microsoft. They've come so far with so little,…

You're conflating development budgets and marketing budgets.

Redhat could invest 200bn into Fedora or any other project, and still people won't switch to it because even if it's "better" by some arbitrary metric, it's not what people are used to.

It's definitely possible, but it looks like Linux is more likely to gain popularity via WSL than via Fedora or similar.

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