Does immutable distros something significant over btrfs snapshots?
Beacuse if you set up grub or refind to auto-load new snapshots, immutable distros starts to look like over-engineered complexity.
So, am I missing something here?
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Depending on how it's done they aren't really comparable.
I'm not familiar with openSUSE's immutable distro, but Fedora bases their atomic variants on what are essentially glorified container images (meaning they include a kernel for example). Every single deployment of a given image will be identical to each other. Only certain directories are writeable so that configuration and user data can be modified independently of the base image.
You can also "overlay" your own/custom packages, which essentially installs them into the image. When updating, a new base image is pulled and your overlayed packages are installed into the base image again. With a "regular" distro, you are deriving from the default install as soon as you install packages or even uninstall default packages (which also works with atomic distros, but the package removal is overlayed).
It's not so much about the ability to rollback as it is about reproducibility across several machines. It's comparable to how iOS (and recently also macOS) and most Android variants work.