this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Wait, what? Iโm legit not familiar with immutable distros, is it like youโre only allowed to modify certain directories?
In simplified terms:
You are allowed to modify stuff but it is not actually changing the install as is.
This is achieved by different techniques like file system overlays, containerisation, btrfs snapshots and so on.
The idea is to replicate the classical behavior you know from embedded devices that have their core functionality in ROM with even firmware updates only overlayed or modern smartphones: You can modify your system but in the end there's always the possibilty to "reset to factory settings" as in: the last known working configuration.
So, baby-proofing Linux?
Iโd describe it as making computer systems reliable.
We prefer "security hardening" but yes that.... Also works lol
Kinda. Generally the user files (including custom installed applications) are on a rw partition. Whereas the system files (OS files, root folder, etc) are on a ro partition. When updates are applied to the core system they come as complete images. No compiling from source on the fly.
The advantages to this is that it should be near impossible to break your system. If you need to roll back to a previous version the system just/downloads/mounts the previous image. There is less flexibility in terms of changing system files. But the idea with immutable distros is that you shouldn't be modifying system files anyways, and there are different ways to accomplish things.
A really good example is Android. Android (non-rooted) is kinda-sorta an immutable distro. Except it uses an A/B partition method, where the active system downloads and installs to the other partition, triggers a flag, then a reboot picks up the flag and boots from the newly installed partition. If anything goes wrong, another flag is triggered and it boots from the "good" partition.
It's not quite the same, but at a high-level it kinda is.
Edit: article I found about it
https://linuxblog.io/immutable-linux-distros-are-they-right-for-you-take-the-test/
Yes, kind of.
Someone might correct me if Iโm wrong but itโs that, plus extra tooling to redirect the stuff that needs to be writable, plus more extra tooling to allow you to temporarily unlock the read-only parts in order to do system updates, plus a system updater that puts the whole system more-or-less under version control.
It's similar to using Deep Freeze on Windows where outside of specific writeable directories anything that shouldn't be changed isn't allowed to change.