linuxmemes

Immutable and Declarative OS design is simply an option. I think it's a damn good one, but right now, it's not for me. That could easily change in the near future.

The idea excites me. A potential hardened OS that user-friendly could be a great option for Business and Academic computing.

Is there any declarative OS that is not immutable?

I tried Fedora Silverblue once and it was all fun and games until I wanted to build a driver.

But I really like the concept of declarative systems.

What's the best immutable OS?

Eh, bring it all on. Part of what is great about FOSS is the vibrant ecosystem. I welcome new stuff, even if I don't have much use for it.

I do think it makes a lot of sense for certain use cases. Like my Steam Deck, great use case for an immutable distro.

Another is school or work deployments where you just need a herd of identical, generic systems or thin clients that run the same small set of applications.

Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.

Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.

However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn't stress me.

I don't need it, I never needed it, and thus I will not use it

If one day I need it I will use it

Capiche?

Imagine being so devoid of soul and spirit you turn your OS into kubernetes

Look, if you love declarative systems that's cool. I'm genuinely happy for you that you have much better options now. That can only be good.

That being said, they only solve problems that I don't have. I do not care even the tiniest amount about whether a system is declarative or not, and I'm definitely not going to go out of my way to seek them out. If you want to call that "out of touch" then so be it.

I just treat my systems like cattle not pets. Get out of line and I will kill ya and bring a fresh copy online

Oh I definitely am out of touch, but I think I'll live with that 😄

Immutable was adopted for Android because Google and the Android vendors wanted to lock down the platform, and because they always distribute their OS images and updates as binary blobs.

It offers no benefits to an open ecosystem like Linux, that you can't already accomplish with existing security measures.

It offers some benefits to distro maintainers who are only willing/able to focus on the core system and delegate the rest of the software to distro-agnostic packages. That's definitely an interesting niche and I look forward to it. But please note that whether the core is immutable is completely irrelevant in this scenario.

Generally speaking, if you want to use distro-agnostic packages you can do that regardless of whether the system is immutable or not.

And since we're on the topic, if we're borrowing things from Android I would love to have the application sandboxing and permissions. I think they'd be a much bigger benefit – to all distros, immutable or not.

Hehe, but unix shell scripting can do so much...

But an immutable distro is not necessarily declarative, and the other way around.

Why lump them together?

I want this but without learning a new functional language to do it.