What's up with all these immutable distributions? What are the benefits and disadvantages of them?
What's up with all these immutable distributions? What are the benefits and disadvantages of them?
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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You know, there was Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided to transform regular machines into MIPS-style shitty devices that have a read-only OSes and a separate partition for configs. :D
TBF the unix model originally was read only mounted / and /usr - typically in a separate partition - so they were immutable for decades. It's only later when home users started using single partition models that that really broke.
But the separation is built right in.. /etc for config, /home for user stuff, etc. so there's really no need for another layer.. it's not like windows were it's common to store the configuration in the same directory as the binaries.. so not really seeing what the current fad is about. Presumably something will come out of it, maybe even a standard..
Yeah I'm with you, I want more reliability but immutable is a bit of a long way to go to get it.
I get why people are willing to make the tradeoff though, docker taught us os configuration should be done programmatically, my workflow is just used to constantly fidgeting things till they feel right, to each their own.
I worked at the big cloud guys, I get the point.
But this isn't a cloud host, this is a workstation that I'm happily tinkering with, I enjoy bending and breaking the os for fun and development.
My data is usually not on the workstation, so clearly it out is no real loss, and I get to experiment more.