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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

"I have a minor inconvenience -- I know, I'll create an entirely new distribution where 99.92% is identical to the base"

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How else are you going to improve the linux gene pool? Breeding linux distros ain't gonna cut it :)

Being able to roll back updates/upgrades that go wrong, is not just fixing a minor inconvenience. There's also something about the critical part of the system being less mutable. Desktop Linux has been way too easy to break in the past.

Tubleweed has snapshots and rollbacks too by default. But yeah immutable distros are good for beginners so they don't destroy their system!

The OS this is based on, Tumbleweed, is what provides that capability. I do not think there is anything novel here.

> I do not think there is anything novel here.

Absolutely wrong.

Tumbleweed is a conventional distro. You're root, you can do whatever you want, you have full R/W access to the entire FS, and updating is by installing lots and lots of packages into the live OS while it is running.

Aeon and Kalpa are immutable: the root fs is largely R/O even to root, and you cannot install or update packages on the running system. To install packages into the OS itself you must reboot, and installation is transactional -- it can automatically undo changes that prevented a successful boot.

Kalpa is the KDE desktop version of MicroOS.

> and installation is transactional

Good explanation, but note that Tumbleweed can use transactional-update with btrfs snapshots like MicroOS. Updates are still applied live though.

Okay, fair enough!

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