I don’t see what the point is of bringing this up.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
> You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.
There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.
> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
That sounds all horribly complicated.
I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).
It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
It’s not horribly complicated. I have a single 3 line script capturing the current state of my homebrew, flatpak, and rpm-ostree state that runs before Pika Backup backs up my entire home directory.
You have 5 bash scripts and various dotfiles. That sounds a lot more complicated.
Bazzite is really not much different to any of the atomic fedora distributions.
The only thing more complicated about immutable Linux is that you have to rethink how you install packages a little bit, as you’re generally using installation methods that offer isolation from your base operating system.
The big upside of this is that essentially all of your modifications are confined to your home directory, and of course system updates and rollbacks are trivial.
The complexity is hidden. I don't require all the gumph. I just gave bash and a Debian install. Pretending the rube goldberg machine isn't one because you've hidden it behind a facia doesn't mean it isn't one.
When all of that complexity doesn't work (which sooner or later it will), it will be more difficult to fix.
I’m confused, how is an immutable system more complex? How is it harder to fix? Can you be specific?
I don’t mean to say “my choice of distro is better than yours” because I know atomic Linux isn’t for everyone. But if we are talking about complexity specifically, this is an advantage to immutable distros.
Your Debian system never exactly matches any specific build that’s been tested and verified by your distro’s contributors.
Even worse when you run dist-upgrade. I think every Debian/Ubuntu user has been burned by that process at least once in their lives, some people avoid it entirely and clean install.
In Atomic Linux anything breaks there is a single command to revert back to the last system image. Rollback reboot and you’re done:
rpm-ostree rollback
There’s also a tool included to list out and revert to any images from the last 90 days.
If I have some kind of issue I have an exact release that every other user has with the exact same set of system and included packages.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)