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Opinions on immutable distros
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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The immutable part (again, only speaking about Silverblue, I don't know about others) refers to the inability to make changes online (i.e. without rebooting), but you can eventually change whatever file you want. The way it works is you would make your changes in a copy of the current filesystem and at boot simply mount and use the copy. If something goes wrong, you just mount the original at next boot and you have rolled back.
Fantastic. Thanks for explaining that to me. That actually sounds very good and not at all restrictive. Cool. I can see why things are moving in that direction.
If you do a rollback, I assume your data remains? I assume you might need to reinstall apps which were not in the original? Or does it keep apps, data and settings across a restore?
In CoreOS (Silverblue),
/etc,/varand/home(which is in fact a symlink towards/var/home) are regular writable partitions, so your data, configs and personal files are not touched by the upgrade/rollback procedure.All the packages (and their dependencies) you've installed extra are also upgraded/rolledback when you do a system upgrade.
Fantastic. That's cool. Thank you 🙏