ostree

Ansible makes mutable changes to the OS, task by task. Nix is immutable. A new change is made entirely new, and only after the build is successful, all packages are "symlinked" to the current system. Fedora Silverblue is based on ostree [1]. It works similarly like git, but on your root tree. But it requires you to reboot the whole system for the changes to take effect. Since Nix is just symlinked packages, you don't need to reboot the system. More detailed explanation here [2]. [1]: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree [2]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-07-12-intro-to-immutable-...

If only there was no downside, but you can't change 15+ years of convention and not break something in the process. For example, I've had Homebrew upgrade fail because someone thought the "master" branch must not only be renamed but also permanently eradicated from a cask repo, Yocto had the same issue [1], etc. [1] https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2360

A couple of small things, but primarily I don’t think it actually embraced immutability in the same way. CoreOS container Linux used A/B partitions for updating truly immutably. Partition B didn’t boot? Just boot A again. Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS use OSTree [1], no shade on OSTree, it works well, but I slept better with A/B partitions, I just find them easier to reason about. [1] https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree

It says it uses abroot rather than ostree https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/ABRoot/ https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/ https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree My impression from the splash page is you're more encouraged to install packages to the base system. Silverblue only has that as the last resort (after flatpak, toolbox and podman).

Because they're established terms, and the witchhunt goes so far as to break builds and cause needless work just for the sake of political correctness: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2360 Political correctness linters require you to explicitly acknowledge or disable warnings when you're doing things like pasting existing URLs. And it never stops with one term. It started with master/slave (which are now replaced with dozens of synonyms that are often hard to figure out), then whitelist/blacklist, and the activists are already queueing up the next words for sure. Few people want to ban others from using alternative terms that they consider better, but where they draw the line is when others prevent them from using the terms they deem appropriate, or demand/force additional work.

I'm curious to hear what solution they are proposing for this, especially since there are at least two existing proposals in that field, in the form of OStree and casync: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree https://github.com/systemd/casync/

I'll throw in a mention of OSTree: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree

What kind of image format does snap use? Is packaging complicated? I've noted that flatpak is a nightmare to package for. I created subuser <subuser.org> which runs on top of Docker, and of course, packaging is as simple as it is with Docker... The big problem is that when you want to update something, it is hard to do so without making everyone have to download a huge image all over again. Of course, you can try to prevent this with layers, but usually updates don't just touch the top layer :( ... So what I really want in the future is to be able to use IPFS or some kind of bittorrent-like download interface for images, so that when you update an image, you only have to download the parts that changed. There is a GREAT demo by a guy named Mathias Buus on this very topic here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sc6_XgNXyk which really gives