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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

This seems poorly motivated.

> What are the benefits of an immutable OS?

> One of the main benefits is security. The base operating system is mounted as read-only, and thus cannot be modified by malicious software. The only way to alter the system is through the rpm-ostree utility.

How is this different from the current experience? "Operating system" files already aren't writable by the user. The only way to alter the system is through the "sudo" utility.

> Another benefit is robustness. It’s nearly impossible for a regular user to get the OS to the state when it doesn’t boot or doesn’t work properly after accidentally or unintentionally removing some system library. Try to think about these kind of experiences from your past, and imagine how Silverblue could help you there.

How often does this happen? I've worked with complete Linux noobies who were "forced" to use Linux in a VM daily and I've never seen this happen.

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>The only way to alter the system is through the "sudo" utility.

The sudo utility doesn't really give any guarantees or produces reproducible states. You can mess around with sudo however you like.rpm-ostree transactions are completely reversible.

Silverblue is the equivalent of an accountant having a transparent history of your machine states. Sudo is like grabbing a pencil, a rubber, and a spraycan and gowing to town.

> How often does this happen? I've worked with complete Linux noobies who were "forced" to use Linux in a VM daily and I've never seen this happen.

Depends on the noob, and just because you never met a situation like that doesn't mean nobody else experiences too (disclosure: it happens all the time)

I was somewhat a noob, I tried to edit Ubuntu's Yaru theme and I messed up and deleted the corrupted system files. There was nothing to worry since I already made backups of the original files, the distress came when I realized I accidentally deleted my good backup files (was bad regex). I wasn't really worried at that moment cause I hoped there would be some repository out there, I could just fetch my files. There was none, none of the latest Ubuntu version or any close old version. Turns out distribution packages are so big (sensibly) it's not that simple to deploy a remote master repository. That was my "wtf open source" moment. I still somehow managed to fix it without any stackoverflow or AskUbuntu. Anyway that's just one case top off my head.

Uggh. This is such juvenile criticism about something that you do not understand. You really need to look at the design of most modern(ish) operating systems in the last few years including Android and ChromeOS which are already mentioned in the article.

Clearly I don't understand, and neither the article nor you were of any help.

If you want to guard against persistent malware, you don't want your system partition to be writable. You also additionally need a chain of trust in the boot process to get to this (trusted and signed) immutable file system. That still leaves the issue of user-downloaded apps/code and how to run them securely in a sandboxed manner. Which Android does reasonably well, but it is perhaps too restrictive for server/general use cases which silverblue is trying to address.

About the configuration issue, if configurations are transactional, you get transactional properties. And that would be quite significant. If you hose your system with an apt/yum update, you don't have much recourse unless you also took a filesystem snapshot before it (which you can do with zfs/btrfs/lvm-thin etc. and people shoehorn these things for precisely this reason). They are all different means to approximate the same end which is transactional package management.

System files aren't writable by normal users in any Linux distribution.

System recovery from backups is pretty easy and well understood too, so I'm not sure what benefit this would bring.

If you want transactions you can install on btrfs and use apt-btrfs-snapshot to automatically take snapshots. It seems this isn't that well-known though, probably because the problem it solves isn't very serious.

As for Android, it's already a frustrating system on phones, something like that on desktops would be total trash.

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