cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/15781466
Am I out of touch?
No, it’s the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
But an immutable distro is not necessarily declarative, and the other way around.
Why lump them together?
I’m guessing this refers to the not entirely separate groups of Nix(OS), Haskell, XMonad fans
Don’t forget us Bluefin/Aurora people either
all 12 of us, THERE IS A DOZEN OF US! A DOZEN!
I want this but without learning a new functional language to do it.
Just waiting for one that requires you to compile one Monad to define your whole distro. Types all the way.
Then I’m writing a blog post how your Linux distro is a burrito.
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.
Immutable partitions are amazing for reliability, then you can just OverlayFS your mutable state on top of it
What’s the best immutable OS?
