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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Personally I'm not super into the idea of immutable Distros, they kind of feel like Phone or Game console operating systems due to being read-only and containerized.
I prefer being able to change stuff without it being overwritten in the next update which is one of my many complaints with the steam deck and it's immutable OS, the system is locked to read-only and even if you unlock it it'll get relocked and all your changes undone at the next update.
The point is you don't need to change stuff. You tell the resulting state of the system, the system will generate that state for you.
You don't change some file somewhere, you change the pipewire settings in your configuration file and rebuild. You save your config to version control so you can recreate the exact copy of your system any time and on any computer by just letting it download the locked versions of all of the packages you have installed.
Well back when I didn't know any better and would go through linux installations because I would break things but also because many of the "recommended linux distros" had problems (f*** you Canonical forcing buggy snaps onto us) I might've thought it was an awesome idea. But now that I know better (both how to not break stuff + fix things if they're broken, and know when people are recommending glitchy trash) it just feels more restrictive. Kind of like a game console, android phone, or S mode. It's not necessarily as restrictive as those things because you can turn it off and do what you want but the updates to the OS will almost never respect the changes you make, as I know from SteamOS.
Because I want to Install portmaster or create services to launch my own scripts on Boot without them being purged blindly by an update (just like How on Game consoles System updates will remove installed homebrew) I'm not into the idea of using immutable systems that lock you out of changes you might want to do that aren't official.
Immutable systems do not "lock you out of changes you might want to do that aren't official", even if steamOS specifically does.
Microos and coreos both allow package layering client side. There is also features landing allowing "unlocking" the read-only filesystem.
More importantly, coreos now allows using Containerfile to customize the distro server side, and then all your computers can pull the same image (with all your hard work stored in the registry, and reapplied via the Containerfile and some cicd). It's certainly a very different and new workflow and there is a lack of tools user facing tools, but that is always the case with new tech.
The workflow I would sell you on is this:
This is a simplification and in practice currently a lot of things are hard to accomplish this way (say bootloader changes). But that is the "goal", and after running highly customized distros for a decade, I at least would love to be able to have all my changes in all my (present and future) computers without the hassle that brings currently