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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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Immutable Operating Systems: Yay or Nay? (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago by simple to c/[email protected]

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I've seen a lot of talks on the benefits of immutable distros (specifically Fedora Silverblue) but it always seemed to me as more of a hassle. Has anyone here been daily driving an immutable distro? Would you say it's worth the effort of getting into?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm keeping a close eye on the various immutable distros. I've tried NixOS a couple of times now, but I ran into issues with software compatibility. My development tools would constantly have issues, which if I put in a ton of work I could generally workaround... Then there was some software that I just couldn't run, and you can't just run a standard "Linux" binary because all of the libraries that most binaries would expect, such as libc, libssl, etc are not in /usr/lib, but rather they are in the Nix store so those binaries need to be patched to search for their required libraries in the correct place.

The final nail in the coffin for my last go around at NixOS was I need to use a specific piece of software that does time keeping for work, and it operated fine until one day it signed me out and the button to sign back in did nothing. Even when I started the program from the CLI, there were no errors. If I can't sign in, I'm effectively not "on the clock" so that is an absolute show-stopper for me. I replaced NixOS with Fedora, and it worked perfectly fine after that. It is a shame because I quite enjoyed the idea of having a reproducible system that allowed me to blow away the system, then reinstall it, point it to a flake I built, and run a command resulting in everything being back the way it was.

I've been wanting to give VanillaOS and Silverblue/uBlue a try, but to my knowledge neither of them support a dual-boot setup, and I run Windows alongside Linux for the occasional game that doesn't work in Linux (as well as a backup environment to be able to access my tools for work, such as the scenario I mentioned earlier). I've heard that you can somewhat get around this by having separate drives and while my Windows install is technically on a different drive, the drive that I use for Linux also has a partition for games in Windows, as that boot drive is only a 240GB drive and I believe both of those distros require that you dedicate the whole drive to it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

it's nice to see someone who actually used it not go in the speech script throwing "deterministic" and "declarative" every sentences without ever giving a sensible use case

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Heh, yeah... don't get me wrong, I think that immutable distros have an attractive appeal to them the way that they're often sold - however in my experience its been very rare to come across anything that comes with significant improvements yet doesn't have any trade-offs or a "price to pay" especially when it comes to computing and software.

Do I think the rough parts will shrink over time? Potentially. I mean, macOS has been basically doing this for quite a few years now with its "System Integrity Protection" and it seems to do fine... but at the same time, aside from homebrew shenanigans I never really needed to modify things outside of /Users and /Applications when I used macOS.

I certainly would like to hear more experiences about these distros that aren't just evangelizing immutability and mention more about their pain points like I did.