The State of Immutable Linux(justingarrison.com) |
The State of Immutable Linux(justingarrison.com) |
Another interesting, though less radical take on an immutable container OS is IncusOS. Made by the same people behind LXC: https://github.com/lxc/incus-os
I wish the article's NixOS section had mentioned impermanence features which can be used to make NixOS actually immutable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence
I heard about Impermanence right after I gave the talk so I'm looking into it.
IncusOS seems like a strong contender.
I've also considered installing Proxmox with ZFS Boot Menu to get a rollback capability. I'd need to figure out how to properly manage state when multiple storage providers are in use. Like for example, what would happen if the pool for VMs had newer data than the root snapshot I roll back to? Even with the answer, obviously the overall theme is Proxmox is not designed to operate this way.
I used to use MicroOS on Raspberry Pis and NUCs but the rolling release actually led to more maintenance work (fixing breaking changes like config changes). Eventually I moved to Ubuntu but kept the mindset that all installed applications should be podman containers. I don't miss MicroOS...
There is quite some innovation within this space of (atomic-arch?) which I am interested about because I wish to recommend arch's bleeding-edge/aur to people and the ability to have snapshots etc. is interesting, which is something that I might need myself as well... as I really get too lazy at times for snapshots.
With their talks, I used to think that it would become very bloated distribution/might not work fast but that's not really the case.
In future, I will take a look at arkane as well!
Since you never touch the base system, you get more or less a rolling release distro, since updating between fedora versions becomes even simpler.