"Immutable" is the new "orange."
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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It promises certain things that traditional distros can't, namely reproducibility and scalability. Many are based on OCI images, which are built and then pushed to everyone. It's definitely the hot new thing, but at least it's not without warrant.
I find it interesting to learn about the different tooling involved with the different immutable distros. Fedora and others use ostree, this one uses arkdep, Nitrux uses overlayroot, Nix uses nix-build, and there's probably others.
a-b-root in VanillaOS, now om version 2.0
Manjaro uses the same stuff as ArkaneLinux
Not sure what XeniaOS (immutable Gentoo) and EndlessOS (immutable Debian) use
CentOS and RHEL will likely use bootc and I think that will replace ostree. Which I find sad, but container tooling is just more popular
I watched a couple of keynotes about it, and bootc is better, tbh. Bootable containers is definitely the way to go, and I'm excited for when it's released to the public (officially, it's still available to download in the meantime).
I've been trying to get a weird VPN package installed that has to be installed to the system layer, but you have to run it as a user. Since containers are mutable, it should be trivial to install it. The main problem with rpm-ostree is that, as great as it is, it only works with RPM files, and sometimes you need to run something that doesn't have an RPM option.
Yes packaging RPMs for random little things is annoying, but not an unsolvable issue.
I think there is a tool to make RPMs from directory structures, but I also never built an RPM.
sddm2rpm is a good example of such a hack.
I've tried looking up guides, and it's not a simple task, especially if you're reverse engineering somebody else's script. If I can just run it in a bootable container as if I was using a typical mutable system, that's something pretty much everybody can do.
But I agree, there's a few tools that make building RPMs and flatpaks easier, and it can be done. It's just that the learning curve is steeper, and that is going to keep certain people away from immutable distros.