Hi there folks, I’m still learning about Linux and have yet to dip my toes properly in any arch based distro. Have for the moment fallen in love with the immutable distros based on Universal Blue project. However I do want to learn about what arch has to offer to and plan on installing default arch when I have time. But have been wondering why I haven’t heard of any immutable distros from arch based distros yet.

So, am left wondering if there are talks within that Arch community of building immutable distros?

While writing this post I found a project called Arkane Linux, which seem to be very interesting. Does anyone have nay experience with it? Is there a specific reason why immutable wouldn’t be a good idea when based on Arch?

Project: https://arkanelinux.org/

  • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    (Note that the immutable distros will only be represented by Fedora, GuixSD and NixOS. The others are either too niche or immature)

    This was my issue with your original comment - I’m aware most of the work on features like these is based on immutable distros, but just being immutable doesn’t mean it will have those features.

    When it comes to reproducibility and declarative system management, I think you’re right that they’re only available in immutable distros.

    The security benefit of a read-only filesystem isn’t very significant IMO, and for some immutable distros, interesting parts (to attackers, like /etc for example) are mutable anyway.

    And I don’t use any snapshot solution currently, but don’t most of them only store the parts that change between snapshots? According to the Arch Wiki, Snapper’s “default settings will keep 10 hourly, 10 daily, 10 monthly and 10 yearly snapshots”. This doesn’t seem like much of an advantage for immutable distros, really.

    There’s no need to go over the “consequences” as they’re (as the name implies) consequences of what has mentioned earlier. Hence, as their causes are better than the one found on traditional distros, so are the consequences better than how they’re found on traditional distros.

    I disagree with this though. “Better” is very subjective - I for one consider being able to have an up to date system that can have parts of it updated without rebooting to be much nicer than using something like rpm-ostree, even if it is safer to use in theory (I can’t remember the last time I had an issue when installing a package; rebooting to apply an install atomically will likely make no difference to me other than wasting my time). I know I can use containers to get around this, but once again, this just adds to the hassle.