Its the ghost, the ghost in the machine. Major Kusanagi would be proud

If you’re not already, just erase your darlings.

Then you can preview what files are lost on reboot (see blogpost).

Not specifically a nixos issue, also at least nix gives you rollbacks

Workstation-as-code is pretty dope for enterprise...

The idea of an immutable, idempotent, declarative workstation, from cradle to grave, tickles me pink.

Fedora Atomic has been working nicely on my personal laptop. Anything funky, I tend to run in a VM w/ libvirt (KVM/QEMU) or a container. Makes it quicker to fix if I break something.

In simplified terms:

You are allowed to modify stuff but it is not actually changing the install as is.

This is achieved by different techniques like file system overlays, containerisation, btrfs snapshots and so on.

The idea is to replicate the classical behavior you know from embedded devices that have their core functionality in ROM with even firmware updates only overlayed or modern smartphones: You can modify your system but in the end there's always the possibilty to "reset to factory settings" as in: the last known working configuration.

Kinda. Generally the user files (including custom installed applications) are on a rw partition. Whereas the system files (OS files, root folder, etc) are on a ro partition. When updates are applied to the core system they come as complete images. No compiling from source on the fly.

The advantages to this is that it should be near impossible to break your system. If you need to roll back to a previous version the system just/downloads/mounts the previous image. There is less flexibility in terms of changing system files. But the idea with immutable distros is that you shouldn't be modifying system files anyways, and there are different ways to accomplish things.

A really good example is Android. Android (non-rooted) is kinda-sorta an immutable distro. Except it uses an A/B partition method, where the active system downloads and installs to the other partition, triggers a flag, then a reboot picks up the flag and boots from the newly installed partition. If anything goes wrong, another flag is triggered and it boots from the "good" partition.

It's not quite the same, but at a high-level it kinda is.

Edit: article I found about it

https://linuxblog.io/immutable-linux-distros-are-they-right-for-you-take-the-test/

Yes, kind of.

Someone might correct me if I’m wrong but it’s that, plus extra tooling to redirect the stuff that needs to be writable, plus more extra tooling to allow you to temporarily unlock the read-only parts in order to do system updates, plus a system updater that puts the whole system more-or-less under version control.

It's similar to using Deep Freeze on Windows where outside of specific writeable directories anything that shouldn't be changed isn't allowed to change.

Debian hasn't done me dirty yet

I had this with a sunshine service being added as a user service in bazzite. I created a clean new user and it booted, confirming it was user based. Took a bunch of binary searching to work out what the issue was.

I've since done my own autostart setup for sunshine and it's been fine ever since.

Crappy UX!

Byebye to your storage 😆

Why are you even running arch at that point, for the DE updates?

Not judging but just fyi, that's like the worst of both worlds tbh. The point of installing independently of the base system is that the system is immutable and easy to roll back to a previous state, if you use a mutable system and also install packages with other means, you're working around a limitation that isn't even there and wasting more space to get almost none of the benefits (aside from easier permission control for Flatpaks)

You're comparing apples and oranges if you focus on immutabilty alone.

EndlessOS may certainly cater to the idea of being user-friendly but unbreakable, but I would consider NixOS to be an advanced distro.

Why is that? What do you feel is the downside?

I suppose it depends on the OS. But the Universal Blue OSs, Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora are the ultimate tinkerer's OSs even though they are immutable.

From my experience it's quite the opposite, cause when something breaks in guix/nix/bazzite you basically need to know how the entire subsystem works to troubleshoot it.

You can't just copy paste some nonsense from superuser to fix it.

Yeah, I'm leaning toward this option tbh.

If we got to the point where popular machines had custom images with all the necessary extra drivers etc, it might be a value add. But for now I'm not seeing a huge benefit

For home? Yes. For professional use where you have to deploy and support tens to hundreds of desktops? Immutable + a proper build tool chain is the best thing since sliced bread. And when you already have that, a copy of that for home makes it good for home use too.

To me, the main advantage of using an atomic distro is that I use my own custom image. It comes with all the packages I need from rpm, and all of my config included. Switching between different machines is a breeze now.

BlueBuild makes creating custom images super easy.

follow [best practice]

Install flatpaks

Dude. Find a security guy who knows about validation and supply chain risks. Tell that person those two phrases. Learning should commence if they're any good.

Wow.