this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Neither of those features are 100% production ready, even on the most cutting edge system.
Even if you are running KDE or GNOME, chances are your apps would still require X.
Why would you want immutable? That would be for either containers or embedded, none of which is Linux Mint's use case.
If you're looking to explore these cutting-edge features, Linux Mint is not for you.
Xwayland
Rpm-ostree works perfectly well for many users. Flatpak is not production ready, but if you do background updates and not that often, you can totally just layer everything you want.
Immutable is not cutting edge, is simply a traced, resettable, secure system. You can reset it with one command. But you can also install as many native packages as you want, simply that updating will take a bit longer then. But updates are done in the background, I dont know if by default, but there is a systemd service.
Flatpak is more mature than you'd think. It also seen more adoption than Wayland (not exactly apples to apples...).
Immutable concept may not be new, but the current implementations are. Even the pioneers such as NixOS, Fedora, and openSUSE are still ironing out quirks as we are having this discussion. Even NixOS, the current top leading, is having performance issues.
Linux Mint have snapshot system. It is not perfect (certainly won't beat immutables), but ot certainly works well for its use cases. Once again, being the latest and greatest is never its use case.
Flatpaks lack:
They are already better in
Never heard of performance issues of immutable OSes. Why should there be.
Linux mints shapshotting works for avoiding errors that happened in between two versions of the OS, during a single update.
If the issue happened over time, or you already updated two times with the error, its useless.
Rpm-ostree allows to:
I think a well-managele system could and should also be possible to do without all that image-creation. Having two seperate systems is not needed if you know exactly whats the difference between your two images.
Wayland probably has more things it lacks. Again, it's not apples to apples comparison.
The performance is more toward manipulating system packages. Since it's not supposed to be changed, a new system image tends to get created everytime user makes modification. At least that's the issue with Nix.
While that rpm-ostree sounds nice, it is not required for Linux Mint's use case.
Yeah, I don't think Linux Mint is for you... Perhaps NixOS would fit you better.
Don't get me wrong, I am interested in the prospect of immutable systems. I just don't think it is a silver bullet for every problem out there.
I think Wayland is the future. In fact, I've been using it as a daily driver. However, it's still a long way to go until it can truly replace X11. For starter, it has some issues that can be dealbreaker for some people (having all the applications terminated upon crash is one). Also, XFCE, MATE, and all the others got some catching up to do.
You may have your opinion, but there are reasons those two features are not as widely adopted (yet?).
I am already on Fedora Kinoite. Not sure if their immutability model is actually suited for rolling Distros though:
sudo ostree admin cleanup 0. Btw wheel can do rpm-ostree stuff without a password prompt.Its a really superior technology and the best overall solution. I was mind experimenting with an only traced system that is not immutable but uses OSTree to manage updates. Only when something breaks you would create a new clean image, or rebase. As most updates work normally since forever.
Because in the process of generating the image, locally the complete OS is build on every update. Not downloaded. But copied etc. This takes a lot of resources, which works fine on monthly updates like on Android, but not so well on daily rolling updates.
To "Linux mint does not require OStree". Rpm-ostree or apt-ostree not. But ostree I think yes. It may be stable and all, but what if its not? And you dont want to reinstall everything? There needs to be a way to reset the system to work again. All rpm-ostree does is remove "it works on my machine though" bugs. Its the only thing newcomers should use.
You are not meant to add tons of RPMs to your system, but you can. Updates can be done in the background, no problem. So you could literally "layer" (thats what its called) any huge piece of software, that doesnt work locally. You can add proprietary drivers, install media codecs and all.
Various ways to make media playback work on RPM Firefox
UBlue, and awesome project creating custom OS and Distrobox/Toolbox/Docker/Podman images for things like Arch+AMDGPUpro Drivers for Davinci resolve. They create their custom versions of the distros with patches for Asus, Framework, Surface, and all out of the box, secured modifications that are reproducible
Ublue really shows the potential of rpm-ostree. Use Fedora as base, to kernel mods, layerings, replacements how you like, and ship the "working out of the box" image for exactly your hardware. Its brilliant.