Fedora Silverblue: the ultimate immutabile distro!

[DiTBho]

see here 

[50ShadesOfDirt]

Interesting ...

One of the things I have to do to make an OS "mine" is to install someone's OS (Windows, Linux), and then spend X amount of time stripping the bad stuff out. X time is larger for Windows, and smaller for Linux.

Immutable means I don't have to do any of this ... leaves me slightly uncomfortable, but hey, that's what testing is for. In a VM it goes ...

I hope Fedora SilverBlue immutabilitiy started from a reasonable (end-user) perspective, in that there is nothing "bad" in it from the start (data collection, etc.)

Thanks for the tip!

[SiliconWizard]

I don't like Flatpak much to begin with, but that's just me.
As to being immutable, how do they allow security updates if the whole OS is not being updated for 13 months straight?
I have not read the entire functioning of their "immutable" distribution, so probably it's obvious, and probably "immutable" is a bit of a stretch.
I don't really see a benefit compared to using a filesystem allowing easy rollbacks, apart from the marketing. But maybe it has a market - just curious what it is.

[ejeffrey]

As to being immutable, how do they allow security updates if the whole OS is not being updated for 13 months straight?

It sounds like each major release has 13 months of security updates, not that it only updates every 13 months.

I don't really see a benefit compared to using a filesystem allowing easy rollbacks, apart from the marketing. But maybe it has a market - just curious what it is.

I think the idea is that instead of applying updates to a live system and then rolling back if something breaks, you apply updates to a private region and then roll-forward after it completes.  I can see this being an interesting idea for servers or for embedded/real time applications where you really want to minimize downtime.  But it still requires a reboot to move to the new state, so I don't really see it as a huge benefit on a desktop system.

I don't buy the "nothing breaks" idea.  It's been ages since "system catastrophically broken by the updater" was a serious problem in any major linux distribution, at least in my experience.  For the most part, in Linux, the reason updates break things is that users have customized the environment, and the new versions change something incompatible with those customizations.  You can help avoid "accidental" incompatibility by careful packaging, and perhaps the immutable system naturally does this, but real changes are still going to cause problems.

[SiliconWizard]

As to being immutable, how do they allow security updates if the whole OS is not being updated for 13 months straight?

It sounds like each major release has 13 months of security updates, not that it only updates every 13 months.

Precisely, my point is that it's not "immutable" if it updates on a regular basis. It's just marketing. Immutable is just one of these trendy buzzwords now.

I get the relative ease of use compared to rolling back things, but I personally don't really buy the whole concept either.

[switchabl]

AFAIK, the base image is immutable. It's basically read-only, you can (and should) swap it out for an updated one but you can not modify it. So you have a fixed set of base packages that are always updated atomically and (hopefully) thoroughly tested in that exact combination.

Technically you can overlay your own packages (and even system ones) but I think that is more a concession to the realities of the Linux desktop than something that is really encouraged. Ideally, you would not touch the base system and install anything else using containers (like flatpak), similar to apps on mobile systems.

I believe that Silveblue is really just an offshoot from Fedora CoreOS which is geared at server/Kubernetes environments where you spin up lots of VMs with the same base image plus some Docker containers automatically. There is also a Fedora IoT as a basis for embedded systems. Silverblue may be the least practical member of the family (for now at least). It's still an interesting experiment. But plain vanilla Fedora isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

[golden_labels]

SiliconWizard: I do not know, which specific model Silverblue uses, but OS immutability refers to some important part of an operating system not being mutable as a part of its normal operation, during operation. By your logic ROM chips/storage are also marketing buzzwords, because you can overwrite most of them — not to mention that entropy will inevitable modify contents at some point.

[DiTBho]

it survives (sudo) rm -r / 

[ejeffrey]

I'm not sure I consider that a positive.

[golden_labels]

Here, DiTBho! Have this bag of --no-preserve-root for the future destruction attempts!

(one can use /* to type less)

[DiTBho]

Have this bag of --no-preserve-root for the future destruction attempts!

it also survives (sudo) rm -rf --no-preserve-root / 

Everything goes destroyed, including the /home/* folders, and GNOME goes crazy, but if you somehow can switch into safe-mode, then it manages to restore restore everything, including the user folders, to 100% working order, as if nothing had happened!

Crazy Distro! Against baboons!

[DiTBho]

+1000 points!!!

it facilitates application segregation, just like Android does 

love this! I like being able to give Gimp the ability to open nothing other than the /documents/pictures folder

(
meantime I'm designing a minimal sandbox to contain shells and everything that is launched by the shell, in a strictly segregated way
I copiy ideas, just like Fedora SikverBlue copied ideas everywhere
even from Git!!!
)

[audiotubes]

As to being immutable, how do they allow security updates if the whole OS is not being updated for 13 months straight?

It sounds like each major release has 13 months of security updates, not that it only updates every 13 months.

Precisely, my point is that it's not "immutable" if it updates on a regular basis. It's just marketing. Immutable is just one of these trendy buzzwords now.

It becomes immutable on the day they stop giving updates

So it's even cooler now, a "futuristic, immutable distro!"

Took a quick look, I guess it would be better to call it an atomic distro. All! Or nothing at all, said Frank Sinatra.

[SiliconWizard]

Well, "immutable" is this trendy term in IT that everyone has to use. So yeah. To paraphrase the fun DreamBerd parody: ( https://github.com/TodePond/DreamBerd/blob/main/README.md )

New for 2023!
Mutable data is an anti-pattern. Use the const const const keyword to make a constant constant constant. Its value will become constant and immutable, and will never change. Please be careful with this keyword, as it is very powerful, and will affect all users globally forever.

From what I got, the "essence" of what is currently called "immutable Linux distributions" is that they just don't have any package manager and don't handle updates or installation via one. They handle that "monolithically" with some "blob" updating, and additional packages can only be installed via flatpaks or whatever equivalent they choose to use for that purpose.

While it can have some use cases, I would say that the principle is almost opposite to the idea of what Linux is, and is likely to give more headaches to users and administrators than it solves in the long run, past the initial excitment of being able to 'rm -rf' everything and still get back to a working state.

[DiTBho]

From what I got, the "essence" of what is currently called "immutable Linux distributions" is that

is that it survives

• "(sudo) rm -rf --no-preserve-root /"
• get $wallware; install(it), exec(it)

 

yep