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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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the whole immutable distro idea is just ludicrous to me, in order to upgrade the software, i.e. the new image that got downloaded, I hafta reboot - what the fuck, is this windows 98? I reboot like never, close my laptop or suspend my desktop in the evening and resume in the morning with all my shit how I left it.
it feels like going the wrong way, wasn't there some progress on hotswapping kernels after upgrade or sumsuch? that was what I thought we were going towards, this feels so awkward and bad on so many levels, nevermind the bloat of getting a whole new OS image because five packages changed... and the cruft and fluff of layering packages and adjacent voodoo, dios mio. basically, everything is way shittier because someone might fuck with /usr/bin or wherever...?
apple did this years ago, with little to no friction. but those fucks update the OS coupla times a year, so dealing with this once a quarter ain't that big of a deal. apple also ships a stellar backup solution with the system that restores the system perfectly, system and user files, whereas no such thing exists over here.
That's not the really weak part of immutable OSes. The really weak part is that they are not immutable, they aren't even locked down for /usr/local/bin.
You have to work just as hard to audit an immutable os.
If you install an app via the built in package manager, yep, you’ll have to restart to update the system image, but for most apps you'll need (and don’t require deep system integration), you could just use appimage, flatpak or snap, which will all work without a restart. I’ve actually been using immutable distros for many times I’ve used Linux, and once you use it, it’s easy to get used to it unless your use case would work better on standard Linux.
Also, I don’t follow much if the kernel hotswapping feature news, but I do know that for these immutable distros, a pretty great feature is that you can just rebase the entire distro via a single command if you’d like, and you’ll keep all user data. I’ve actually done it on one of my spare laptops, rebasing from fedora kionite to bazzite linux, and it wasn’t awfully fast, it took an hour or so, but I find it impressive nonetheless.
That's really neat. Maybe a new breed of distrohopper will be born.