this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Linux

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For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They also separate concerns better than classical distros. Executable binaries & libraries are separate from configuration which is separate from data. It makes backups much simpler, makes configuring new machines easier than something like Ansible, etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I especially look forward to replacing Ansible :)
Tried to do so with Guix though and I have to say I found it quite difficult, but I hope it catches on and becomes easier to use.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not so sure about simpler. I really don't like the Nix language and I'd rather use Guile, but the amount of packages and configuration options drew me to NixOS.