The State of Immutable Linux

bjoli

I went all in about a year ago after running microOs for some time. I am pretty happy with the situation, and while I do like the transactional-update way of microos, their immutable desktops have been too much work for me. Kalpa is alpha, and aeon runs gnome. I tried for a year, but one day I had enough and installed kinoite and haven't looked back (although I have been looking at Aurora). Since you never touch the base system, you get more or less a rolling release distro, since updating between fedora versions becomes even simpler.

madspindel

> It’s 2026, if you’re not using something immutable (or at least reproducable) you’re doing more maintenance work than you should. I used to use MicroOS on Raspberry Pis and NUCs but the rolling release actually led to more maintenance work (fixing breaking changes like config changes). Eventually I moved to Ubuntu but kept the mindset that all installed applications should be podman containers. I don't miss MicroOS...

evanjrowley

Glad to see Talos Linux there! Another interesting, though less radical take on an immutable container OS is IncusOS. Made by the same people behind LXC: https://github.com/lxc/incus-os I wish the article's NixOS section had mentioned impermanence features which can be used to make NixOS actually immutable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence