this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Sorry, hard disagree from me.
Immutable distros solve a lot of problems and are IMHO a great idea. I love my SteamDeck with SteamOS, I really like Silverblue and OpenSUSEs MicroOS (Avalon or however it is called right now). For my desktops/servers Debian is the best choice right now, but my Thinkpad from 2012 which runs now happily as an entertainment machine is a perfect example where an immutable distro would be much better and practical.
Immutable distros are a solution to a real problem, and this problem is not solved by Ansible/BTRFS etc. Hell, I'll happily jump ship sooner than later. Of course, YMMV and I don't say immutable distros solve all problems for everyone, but having this option is great IMHO.
Well I tried Aeon for a month and it has been the least reliable system I’ve used since, well actually probably anything, like maybe vista I guess.
The thing is a mess and it brings nothing to the table over A/B snapshots.
The scales must be different for enterprise use because I’d never go near another immutable OS again after this terrible experience.
Maybe it’s just flatpak that’s unreliable on Aeon, I found moving electron apps into podman containers was a lot better. But on void it was fine, clearly a lot more work to do the flesh it out I goes.
Tbf SB had far less issues than Aeon.
Just tell me what that problem is and how it isn't already solved with Ansible/BTRFS.
Some examples pointed out above, the big thing is the 'immutable' and bit for bit replication to the best of my knowledge.
Ansible is imperativ and applies changes to a starting state. Immutable distros replicate a known state 100%, which is in every respect superior and prevents nasty surprises Immutable distros are 100% reproducible from a config file, which is a big thing for cyber security, building software etc. Debian has too many packages given the amount of contributors they have. The immutable distros are mostly moving to flatpak, which hopefully means that the Distros can focus their energy on a great core experience, and communities like LibreOffice can focus on creating a great flatpak experience.
Nobody says that containers / and/or immutable distros are a good solution for your specific needs and use cases, that's fine. For me, and after using Silverblue for some time (and btw. containers on multiple occasions), I am looking forward to jumping ship, because I like the user experience, declarative configurations are the logical next step when using Ansible and atomic updates in the backgrounds w/o the problems of package managers are great IMHO.
So does Ansible. Pick something like Alpine and destroy and recreate instances whenever you need to change your setup. Done.