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Comment by evol262 | Hacker News Reader

This _is_ Silverblue and other ostree-based repos.

This article is focused on containers because when the root OS is immutable, then mutable developer workflows/etc necessarily happen in containers (distrobox, toolbox, whatever). OSTree is/was commonly described as "git for filesystems". Every update is an entirely new system image which applies a 3-way diff. It's possibly to state in a single command "show me the drift in my config files/data versus the ref I'm running" and/or "show me the diff between my running system and an update I may apply".

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I think Silverblue's approach is a good start, but for desktop usage I'd like to see userland "environment" things like DEs get their own layer with a similar treatment as the root OS, so you could e.g. roll back GNOME or KDE independent of the rest of the system if you so desire. This would also make it very difficult to inadvertently put the system in an unusable state through things like dependency conflicts — if your DE fails to start it can simply fall back and start the last known good version.

The lines for what counts as "environment" are fuzzy which might pose a challenge, but the fix for that could be as simple as offering sane defaults and letting the user decide what is/isn't included.

> I'd like to see userland "environment" things like DEs get their own layer with a similar treatment as the root OS, so you could e.g. roll back GNOME or KDE independent of the rest of the system if you so desire. This would also make it very difficult to inadvertently put the system in an unusable state through things like dependency conflicts — if your DE fails to start it can simply fall back and start the last known good version.

Yes! I've been thinking about the same thing as an accessibility feature for disabled users, as well. I recently learned that I'm going blind, and so I've been thinking about how this kind of mechanism could be used to ensure that a system always has, e.g., a working screen reader and fullscreen magnification software. I'd like to add something like this to NixOS, which is my favorite distro and daily driver.

Have you played with distrobox at all?

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/r...

>It's possibly to state in a single command "show me the drift in my config files/data versus the ref I'm running" and/or "show me the diff between my running system and an update I may apply".

I can see how this can be usable for configuration. But I am having a hard time imagining how this would look for something like PostgreSQL's data files.

You run your DB inside a container as usual - volumes for data storage, read-only base container with non-root user.

/var is not immutable, /home is also relocated to /var/home on Fedora Silverblue for this reason (as far as I recall, it's been a while since I've checked up Silverblue)

I have switched to fedora Silverblue because I wanted my system to be as stable as possible between updates. But I think it's true that one has to delve into container technologies to fully use the OS, and that is a bit of an overhead.

These types of distros are currently suitable for users who are either very advanced OR non-technical (who’s needs are completely filled by an app store).

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