I haven’t tried any yet, but my understanding is that recently there’s been a trend of immutable Linux distros, where the root filesystem is immutable (read-only). Instead of directly changing stuff in /etc, installing apps, etc, you instead update some sort of config that says exactly how to set up the system, and rerun a script that rebuilds the root.
System updates are atomic - either the whole update is completed, or the whole update is rolled back. If the system breaks, you can revert back to an old config file and restore it to exactly the same state as it was before.
It’s still not very common - the majority of Linux systems aren’t doing this.
Small note: at least in the case of the rpm-ostree distros (Silverblue, Bazzite, etc), /etc is one of the few directories outside of /var that’s mounted RW.
I haven’t tried any yet, but my understanding is that recently there’s been a trend of immutable Linux distros, where the root filesystem is immutable (read-only). Instead of directly changing stuff in /etc, installing apps, etc, you instead update some sort of config that says exactly how to set up the system, and rerun a script that rebuilds the root.
System updates are atomic - either the whole update is completed, or the whole update is rolled back. If the system breaks, you can revert back to an old config file and restore it to exactly the same state as it was before.
It’s still not very common - the majority of Linux systems aren’t doing this.
Small note: at least in the case of the rpm-ostree distros (Silverblue, Bazzite, etc),
/etcis one of the few directories outside of/varthat’s mounted RW.