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Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

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Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#51
I am currently on Mint, but will soon switch to Fedora Silverblue again, and then I encapsulate things for dev with Distrobox, which also can encapsulate home directory and export apps to the host system, see https://youtu.be/Q2PrISAOtbY

That's basically what I want, encapsulation and buttons :)

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#52
post #39
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> add the decsync plugin to the evolution flatpak This sort of thing is very common with GUI software on Linux. Outside of this bubble, most software comes with batteries included. Eg Solidworks never makes me download optional dependencies, but FreeCAD made me do it literally every 15 minutes as I move to the next step in a CAD/CAM/sim/render workflow. Also see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-lett…

Great link. However, I don’t know how Joel could see a newcomer can challenge an incumbent, short of reimplementing all features. Certainly, Google Sheets didn’t do that. Nor has airtable (valuation considerations aside, it has seen some adoption). In a new category, or a new market, there is no benchmark. So that’s the east case. But sometimes new products do displace old products, and sometimes just by distribution…

Fair point, but Sheets hasn't replaced Excel. Sheets only competes in the in-browser market and Sheets by itself does not make money for Google. If you go back a few years, Microsoft was the 80%-er that lacked features (notably real-time collaboration) whereas Google offered an entire suite of software with free real-time collaboration. People pay $6/mo to get the entire suite for their company. Gsuite is not comparable to the "lite" word processors that Joel was talking about or the open-source tools like FreeCAD that I was talking about. Both are objectively worse than their paid counterparts and extremely limited in functionality.

Also worth mentioning that Sheets has competition in this space now that in-browser 365 Excel is free. Tho neither is feature-complete vs desktop Excel

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#53
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…

Wow you're using Silverblue all wrong, you're even using regular Fedora wrong.

Even before I switched to Silverblue I was known to create Ubuntu containers to run tools from there.

That's what you should have done, run it in a container. If you're not comfortable with containers then the workflow in Silverblue will feel very strange.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#54
While I am glad Silverblue is on this list, not having Fedora CoreOS on it too is a shame. FCOS is an amazing OS to run in production and it has come a very long way since the CoreOS acquisition. I find that FCOS is a good middle ground of being usable and easy to learn while still being immutable compared to Nix.

The FCOS devs introduced a new feature called CoreOS Layering which lets you define your system in a Dockerfile and FCOS will rebase to that state and all you have to do is reboot to configure your server. It is super powerful.

Anyways, your next project needs a VM, give it a shot. I made a Python based CLI tool to help you develop locally on a Linux workstation to create a Butane file to fit your needs. Below is the GitHub for Bupy and a good example of running an app (Paperless NGX) on FCOS with the CoreOS Layering features.

https://github.com/quickvm/bupy

https://github.com/quickvm/fcos-layer-paperless-ngx

https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/container/

https://github.com/coreos/enhancements/blob/main/os/coreos-l...

https://github.com/coreos/layering-examples

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#55

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?

yeah Office365 is a problem. If I really need that I'll either run up a VM for windows or I'll use works citrix session (or the work laptop)

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#56
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…

> My instinct here is to create a symbolic link with the Ubuntu name that points to the Fedora rpm managed library.

I sympathize, but also AIUI this is exactly the sort of monkey patching that these systems are trying hard to avoid; yes, it fixes your immediate problem, but it leaves an undocumented, unmanaged change in how your system finds libraries. In my personal experience, this is the kind of change that leads to machines growing weird behavior that ends when I give up and so a clean reinstall.

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#58

Good timing, I'm minutes away from installing openSUSE Aeon. MicroOS Desktop turned into Kalpa (KDE) and Aeon (GNOME), but the latter has all the momentum.

> MicroOS Desktop turned into Kalpa (KDE) and Aeon (GNOME), but the latter has all the momentum.

Honestly tying the OS to the desktop environment is the only reason I haven't installed microos. Making a derivative with my preferred DE is on my "maybe someday" list, but that's a long list...

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#59
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,…

I mean, where do you think Ubuntu came from?

Re: Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems

#60
post #34

It's interesting to watch these immutable images being adopted in the wider computing community. This has been a thing forever in the embedded world with Yocto/Peta Linux/Buildroot images. The image is a usually a straight disk image and is read-only in operation. This doesn't inherently fix all the insecure IOT stuff as you usually need some way to reimage the device with updates and it takes at least some skill to…

It has not been possible/practical to use immutable system images until recent advances like ostree/flatpak/systemd-homed. We didn't "just discover" some secret only known to the embedded community, lots of people have been working toward this exact goal for a long time, because we already knew for a long time that it has a lot of advantages.

"It has not been possible/practical to use immutable system images until recent advances like ostree/flatpak/systemd-homed."

no, you can just mount overlayfs with ram-backing for example

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