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this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I recently noped out of NixOS. It's a great concept, but I'm old and I don't want to spend the rest of my days configuring stuff just to get to where I would be in 30 minutes on a less rigorously designed distro.
That is, until your distro releases an update and you're like "what do you mean the update failed? So does that mean the update script rolled the changes back?" and then you find out your entire system is in a half updated state and you need to clean install
Ever heard of btrfs snapshots and immutable?
I use NixOS which is immutable
NixOS isn't the only immutable distro...
It's not even fully immutable, but it has a lot of the protections of it. The declaritive part is pretty hot and the package system is expansive and extremely safe.
it's also really nice to be able to commit new changes without rebooting.
What's not fully immutable? You can't modify the store
Not everything in the config paths are in the store.
None of the users are in the store
Any users can run arbitrary binaries as long as they're not dynamically linked.
Root can permanently add and remove arbitrary stuff to/from the store at run time.
It's pretty good in a lot of ways you can't modify hosts and you can't throw stuff into cron, but a great deal of Nixos is mutable.
Every immutable system allows you to run binaries
And the other 4 items?
Couldn't reproduce modifying the store as root, but the users thing is true
Not sure which things are not in the store though
Root can't hit it simply, it's mounted rw, with a RO mount inside. Root can just check add and remove stuff while running with nix commands.
Basically, it you have a privileged access exoloit, it's possible to target someone in ways you can't in silverblue
Some people have made ways to make it more immutable. You can do things like add user folders and etc to the store. Harden it a little more. I'm the end, priv can just modify config*.nix and run rebuild in the background changing whatever.
Other os, you have to commit changes and actually reboot. Which gives you an opportunity to check for changes and deny. Or at least fully detect it happened.
It's not that it's dangerously insecure, but it's important to recognize it's not actually bulletproof and targeted attacks are still quite possible. It's LEAGUES more secure than regular OS, but you can't go full LifeLock on it.
To be fair, with btrfs and whatever snapshot tool your distro has, you can make any distro just about impossible to fuck up.
Yeah, let me enable snapshots when it's already fucked
Yeah and while you’re at it, why not wait till after the boat is sinking to go out and buy life vests.
That's exactly the point, that feature is only there if you know about it
I just keep my home folder backed up safely. The software installed doesn’t really matter to me since I can redownload things pretty quickly
But how do you know which software you had installed?
I don’t really. I just sort of reinstall things as I need them
And then you'll wonder why the game that used to run in Wine doesn't run anymore
Not only that, programs just break by themselves. LocalSend broke because some deps broke. I use versions that I've verified to work. Being able to revert and just use my computer is a godsend.
That's saved my ass soooo many times. I now screw with X or Wayland to my hearts content, change 2-3-10 things at a time. ohh something didn't work? reboot!
Is this one of those Arch things that I'm too immutable to relate to?
Yes, that's why I'd like to run something as clean as NixOS. For now my compromise is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed's btrfs snapshots.
I'm in an interesting place because I installed tumbleweed as a server. At some point there was a change to networking and when I updated, networking didn't work anymore, so I had to roll back to just before the update. I don't want to start from scratch, and I don't want to either bring a screen to it and troubleshoot what's going on again. I tried in the past, and after a few hours of getting nothing (everything should be fine, it just doesn't send or receive anything), I rolled it back and walked away. I have a feeling I just need to run yast and reconfigure there after updating, I just don't want to go through the effort of fixing it because it still runs fine.
openSUSE Tumbleweed made me a full Linux convert. I have "messed up" quite a few times, since I'm still very much a Linux noob, but openSUSE gave me that real confidence in my setup that I now boot into Windows only for a program or game that won't work with what I am needing at the moment, which is almost 10% of the time. Modding games is a hobby, and that's still not as easy as it is in Windows. Come on Nexus Mods, you can do it! :'-)