Immutable distro resources https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

Fedora is probably the most mature immutable desktop distro right now, both Silverblue (Gnome) and Kinoite (KDE). I use Kinoite on my Thinkpad x270 and it's been perfect so far.

Ubuntu will release its own version, Ubuntu Core Desktop, “soon” (got delayed earlier this year)

Another interesting one is Bazzite. Inspired by the Steam Deck OS but runs on Fedora (instead of the Steam Deck's Arch) with all the possible Nvidia, AMD, and other gaming enhancements enabled https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/

Don't forget the swaywm variant.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/sway/

Or Fedora Budgie Atomic: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/budgie/

Also consider Vanilla https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/31/vanilla_os_friendly_r...

Skim through this survey: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3386/paper9.pdf

Basically, most of the system is read-only and updates/rollbacks are atomic.

This approach means classical distributions can enjoy some of the advantages of NixOS.

Manjaro is an Arch Linux-based distro. It has an experimental immutable implementation which is now out for community testing.

"immutable" is the part I'm not sure I understand. Does it mean you can roll back upgrades to any package, like in Nix?

Immutable means it does not change.

Presumably this means that the operating system is effectively read only.

This is good for applications where you want things to be very stable.

Say we find a bug in the operating system. What is the procedure for fixing the bug?

Deploy an updated, but immutable image.

Like, Partition1 has v1 and you boot, read only. Then the upgrade image goes in Partition2 and boots readonly.

You can still upgrade but every boot of the image is from the same fixed state. And you don't upgrade in-place.

They do "atomic" updates for immutable distributions, effectively treating an "apt update" always as an update for all components. There's some systems for this that usually require a reboot afterward to load the new system version.

Is this like a Live CD?