Opinions on immutable distros

Footnote2669@lemmy.zip to Linux@lemmy.ml – 94 points –

Hey! I’m currently on Fedora Workstation and I’m getting bored. Nothing in particular. I’ve heard about immutable distros and I’m thinking about Fedora Kinoite. The idea is interesting but idk if it’s worth it. CPU and GPU are AMD. Mostly used for gaming.

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Immutable distros are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property solution.

We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform / BS like Docker / Kubernetes does.

“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.

As with CentOS’s fiasco or Docker it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.

We had good examples of immutable distributions and architectures before as any MIPS router and/or IOT device is usually immutable and there are also reasons why people are moving away from those towards more mutable ARM architectures.

this was a whole bunch of rambling and complaining without amounting to much. what's actually got you upset about increasing the security model?

  1. immutable distros don't provide "increased security" at least not when compared to properly done thing; 2) will lead to a path of even more corporate powered repositories, closed sources and payed ecosystems.
  1. it does tho as that is the entire point
  2. it won't, as that logic doesn't make any sense.

** you should remember that desktop Linux as is, is horribly insecure and any security increase is putting you leagues ahead of most others. immutability is ensuring a minimum level of stability and security.

You are complaining about rambling and didn't deliver a single argument how immutable distros increase security. Also I think you are wrong big time with 1.