I find that many Linux users have a misconception about immutable distributions without knowing what it actually is. There is a lot of misinformation and generalization in the Internet about immutable distributions being “locked down”, “inflexible”, etc., when we could argue the same with many traditional distributions. In this article, we’ll look at what makes an immutable distribution, the concept of an immutable distribution versus implementations, misconceptions about immutable distributions (both pro and con), and why they exist in the first place.
  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Inflexible by Nature

    This is my biggest concern with immutable distros, but this article says nothing to address it. It gave examples of changing certain parts in NixOS, but I’d rather see a couple of “hello world” type examples for a few other popular immutable distros.

    Eg, how do I alter a file, say /etc/fstsb, in Fedora Silverblue, Nitrux, BlendOS etc? Is it as easy as remounting your root as r/w and saving? Or does it require a 100 steps? If it isn’t straightforward, then it may well be considered as inflexible.

    • throwawayish@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      Eg, how do I alter a file, say /etc/fstsb, in Fedora Silverblue, Nitrux, BlendOS etc?

      I’ll answer for Fedora Silverblue as it’s the only one I’m confident about. So, by default, both /etc and /var are writable. Furthermore a lot of traditionally writable parts (like /home) are contained within /var as well. So say you’d want to edit /etc/fstab (which I’ve done in the past), then you’d literally do it the very same way you’d do it on non-‘immutable’ distros. So; copy (the content of) /etc/fstab, change whatever you want and sudo cp the modified file to /etc/fstab and you’re done.

      Perhaps interesting to point out is that, on Fedora Silverblue, all changes compared to the pristine copy of /etc (which is kept in /usr/etc) are being tracked and can even be accessed with ostree admin config-diff. Note that ‘traditionally’ the contents of /usr has been one of the harder parts to modify on Fedora Silverblue and I’d argue the average Joe should not engage with it as it’s very easy to mess up. However, uBlue actually enables one to engage relatively easily with those harder to modify parts. And the amount of configurability it allows should definitely put anyone to shame that continues to posit that “immutable is inflexible”.