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Comment by hodgehog11 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the "image-based" strategy taken here is unlikely to be appealing to many members of this community.

It could be very effective for bringing in those who are not particularly computer literate under the claimed guarantee that a random update is unlikely to break the machine. But you would also need significant financial backing and marketing with strong brand recognition to inspire that kind of confidence.

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I think the right way to do this is with snapshots, the way opensuse microos is doing it, for example. You get the best of both worlds that way - you still can easily install packages into the OS to customise it, and you do get painless updates and rollbacks. There's a very narrow use case where you _do_ want images, but for that you'll want to control the complete secure boot chain for attestation, so I'd dismiss it here.

Fun fact, a bit over a decade ago we were probably the first one ever to publish a distribution to rely on btrfs snapshots per default with the Jolla phone. Sadly that did bite us due to reliability of btrfs at the time, and later phones switched to ext4, but with a stable filesystem it's a nice mechanism for handling updates and factory reset.

I would think of my self as atleast computer literate and i very much prefer atomic linux to traditional distros, arch or nixos. If you are in luck with hardware - you get system that is hard to polute with my actions and everything developer i do in separate distrobox. Rolling back versions or even hoping to completely different immutable distro is just restart away. I've never been so peaceful with linux.

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