Fedora Onyx Aims To Be A New Fedora Linux Immutable Variant

[jacob]

There hasn't been any software requiring atomic updates for as long as I've been running Fedora (or Red Hat before that). And 'dnf history rollback' provides that function for a non-immutable environment.

I get the concept - we use Chromebooks - but it seems more oriented towards protecting the system from users. Even there it's ineffectual, as people just blindly follow instructions that they find online.

It doesn't "protect" the system from users because it's specifically designedto allow installing custom packages (even customised builds of existing packages). What it does is it provides complete traceability of the system files, reproducible installation/imaging and even multiboot into several different versions/commits. I like it

[fong38]

But how is that better than having a setup like Btrfs + Snapper on openSUSE? That also allows you to roll back any updates (as well as other system changes made in Yast).

Going through the hassle of setting it up in a way that allows easy rollback using a flat hierarchy and a bunch of fstab mounts (in the case of BTRFS at least) if your distro hasn't done that for you already, fiddling around with system state, figuring out which directories to exclude (as they may include only log files or caches and backing those up may end up being either a waste of space or could cause a loss of useful information in case of a rollback) and ensuring you don't accidentally lose any modifications to your system you made after a snapshot on rollback. Also not being tied to either BTRFS or ZFS.

[horizonbrave]

Do all these variants support Wayland as the default and mighty Gnome one?
If not.. yuck!

[qarium]

I read both links, and it's still not clear to me what the benefit of immutable is. It says the core OS files are read-only until updated. I don't see how this is different while I am logged in as a regular user -- until I make the decision to update as root. I guess immutable implies there is an additional guarantee that a root process can't have an accident, but obviously there is a mechanism for updating, so ...

there is a difference when you think of a trojan horse or virus... is something has a security hole and want to manipulate files on your system... a immutable system makes it extra hard for a virus/trojan to manipulate system files for install a keylogger or something like that.