• marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
    1·
    17 hours ago

    It requires literally zero work from me to maintain, that’s why I’m enthusiastic and want the project to do well. Saying mutable Linux is zero work is dead wrong. And if you do put work into your system, it actually sticks and doesn’t decide to explode one day over it.

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Most of the work in my system is installing software and changing configurations of said software. The rest is using the software. What is the difference in the amount of work here? I guess on an immutable system you will also be installing software and modifying configuration files.

      In my system something can malfunction to which I have to change some system configurations: for example past week I had to change some systemd-resolved configuration because on a specific interface it was using some random DNS I didn’t want it to use. I assume this work will also have to be done on an immutable system.

      What is the work which you have to do on a normal distribution and not on an immutable system?

      • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
        2·
        17 hours ago

        How long have you been using Linux? I’ve been using it since around 2004. About every 2 years a major upgrade would make my computer kill itself and I’d have to manually repair it over the course of a weekend. I do security software work and often to make that suite of software (some of it not niche like vpn apps) function you must alter some system files. Layering these apps over the system solves the problem.

        • ranzispa@mander.xyz
          1·
          17 hours ago

          I’ve been using Linux as my main OS for about 15 years. I had my system break down in other occasions in the same way you describe. It is a nuisance, but luckily it never was a major problem. I believe once I had to reinstall the system, I was very happy to have a separate home partition.

          I’m not sure what you mean by layering apps over the system, that could be interesting. Especially because I imagine something like a VPN needs root access. Is it possible to install a binary as a service with root access if that is not available in the repositories? I do for example have to use a quite obscure VPN protocol.

          • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
            2·
            17 hours ago

            Yeah. You can layer it like a git repo fork layers it’s changes. If something breaks you can just clear that forked branch and redo it. Takes like 2 minutes to fix.

            So yeah you can alter system files in a very safe way and can easily revert changes if you don’t like the result. rpm-ostree reset is the command that clears all changes and resets to master.