Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images

#11

Post by mgrandl » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

4llan wrote: post #6

danudey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably worth also mentioning ostree, and maybe specifically rpm-ostree: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/ 1. Versioned, checksummed OS images 2. Local changes layered on top 3. Change the underlying tree (upgrade or rollback) without affecting user data and then replay the local changes. It's great in the sense of 'I want a reliable and robust system', though it's awful in that if I want to install foobar-d…

rpm-ostree is being phased-out in favor of bootc[1], which uses ostree in the underlying code. 1. https://bootc.dev/bootc/

And ostree is likely being replaced with composefs in the near future… things are moving fast in bootc!

Re: Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images

#12

Post by xk3 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

ezst wrote: post #9

danudey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably worth also mentioning ostree, and maybe specifically rpm-ostree: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/ 1. Versioned, checksummed OS images 2. Local changes layered on top 3. Change the underlying tree (upgrade or rollback) without affecting user data and then replay the local changes. It's great in the sense of 'I want a reliable and robust system', though it's awful in that if I want to install foobar-d…

And with dnf/rpm updates being transactional and easy to undo with `dnf history` or `dnf distro-sync`, I never saw the appeal for a day-to-day OS of fedora atomic & al.: only a worse user experience with a slower system, slower updates, and terrible disk usage in a time of storage scarcity. I keep missing the obvious and telling myself that I'm dumb for it, but OTOH, this box is running fedora 44 with some big COPR (…

Yeah I tried Kinoite on a couple machines for a couple years and it's so much easier and faster to use normal Fedora for single dev/server machine.

However, I can definitely see some situations where it would work well -- especially with the bootc changes so that is is more of a bootable container, Dockerfiles/Containerfiles driven

Re: Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images

#13

Post by xk3 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

None of the comments here are really about the article! Of course one can always turn an ISO into a writable filesystem but this is doing something a bit different. Pretty interesting! Thanks for sharing

Re: Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images

#14

Post by danilocesar » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #10

danilocesar wrote: post #8

Installing plain fedora in an external nvme drive and boot from there works pretty nicely. Luks, uefi, fstrim, everything works fine. I boot it from my desktop, laptops or from virt-manager when I need a quick change. The only thing I couldn't make it work was the proprietary nvidia drivers.

I once killed the installation of a work laptop, with such an approach. I used an external SSD disk to run Linux from it, and one day whatever happened while shutting down the OS, killed the partition on the internal drive. Thus making me having to request a fresh installation of everything, and losing some stuff in the process, as that killed the cryptographic key for the disk as well. Never again, lesson learned.

Can you talk more about it? So an issue during shutdown running from the external drive destroyed a partition of a internal drive?

I can see power issues corrupting the external drive (and I can live with that), but I'm wondering what went wrong in your case.

I'm not sure running the whole thing from a live-boot (which is kind of the point of the topic, different from a external installation which is what I use) would have prevented anything.