 No matter what part of the Linux community that you pay attention to you've probably heard the term immutable distro And if you aren't in the know this term might be confusing to you You've heard the term immutable distro on this channel if you've watched it before I've covered distributions like silver blue I've covered quinoa. I've talked about micro s. I've talked about the steam deck All of these distros are in the case of the steam back devices have something to do with immutable distros or immutability So the question then becomes what does it mean to be an immutable distribution or an immutable OS? Whatever you want to call it. So the answer to that question can be enormously complex and the technological underpinnings of how an immutable distribution work are beyond most people to explain unless you are actually a developer of those types of systems So what I wanted to do today was talk a little bit about in general What an immutable distribution is why it's good why it's bad and Talk a little bit about my opinions on the immutable distribution future that we're supposedly facing So I have talked about this before in specific videos regarding specific distributions But I wanted to make a video more general about this topic so that it's not distro specific So let's go ahead and jump in the first thing we should talk about is the definition of an immutable distro So what is an immutable distro? Well the baseline level simplistic answer to that question is Simply that it is a distribution that has a read-only aspect to its file system And when I say a read-only aspect of it usually what we're talking about is the base level System files of the distribution things that are in your Etsy folder in your root folder in your boot folder Those things are completely immutable meaning that they cannot be written to so Anything that you do write to those files, which you can write to them then being read-only doesn't mean that you can't make changes in there What it does mean is that when you reboot at least in theory any changes that you have written in those Immutable files will go away. It'll be completely wiped out and the image that you boot from will be clean Just like it was when you first booted into it the first time after an upgrade So if you stopped there with just the basic definition of an immutable distribution you would probably be confused because you'd wonder how is it possible for you to have a read-only file system or in this case a read-only, you know system level file system and Still be able to upgrade your distribution How can you perform updates and upgrades and all this stuff? Well, the answer to that question is that the way Immutable distributions work they have a built-in package management system of some kind just like every Linux distribution but it handles things a little bit differently the package management systems on Immutable operating systems or immutable distros every time they perform an upgrade what they'll basically do is they'll take the image that you're currently booting from and then make it an another image of that Distribution they'll perform the upgrades on the new image and then once it's done You'll reboot and you'll boot into the new image thinking think of it as basically cloning the partition That you're booting into it's not quite that simple, but the idea is basically the same You'd clone the partition that you're on make the upgrades to the clone and then you'd boot into the clone They call an image upgrade system and basically it allows you to Have images as a backup of some kind now It's not obviously going to be backing up your entire system your personal files and stuff like that are still yours to back up But that base level Immutable system the basic building blocks of your system are going to reside in each image that the package management system creates and That means that when you do an upgrade and say it fails Let's just say sort of for whatever reason they pushed out an upgrade to pipe wire or something that completely break your audio You could go then go back to the previous image where your audio still worked before the upgrade happened and The idea here is that those snapshots will are there for you to go back to if you need to but Because they are created each time by the package management system. You are getting a pristine Image every time your system is upgraded to a image that is for sure Bootable because it has been tested on every single machine that has been installed on so that's the basic idea of an immutable operating system I hope I did a fairly good job of explaining it now We're gonna talk a little bit about the benefits and disadvantages The idea will hopefully become a little bit clearer to you as we go along in the video but the basic level idea is that the System that you have installed is a read-only file system below a certain level So anything that has to do with the system is read-only now Obviously there is a layer that sets on top of that read-only file system that you can write to This is the place where you'd install things like flat packs and all of your programs and your user files and stuff like that That stuff stays on top of the read-only file system So that stuff is and behaves more like a regular Linux distribution So let's go ahead then and talk about the benefits what we're gonna start usually on my channel I tend to start off with the negative stuff But we're gonna turn over a new leaf at least for this video and I'm going to talk about the benefits first So the biggest benefit that people point to most often when it comes to Immutable distributions is security now now we're gonna talk a little bit later on why this isn't such a big deal for desktop Linux users But when if you're talking about the broader point of an immutable distro Security is a big deal because the base level of the distribution is read-only any nefarious action that is taken on That data is temporary. So anything that a malware or whatever It you know writes to those files will go away once you've rebooted your system at least in theory now Obviously if a you know bad actor gets access to your computer has root access can actually use the package management system to Write their changes to the user files or to even to the base level files You know then you're gonna be more in trouble But because of the immutable aspect of these distributions it makes it much harder for Remote act bad actors to get access to your computer and actually make changes that are permanent you most of the time it'd be Damn, you're impossible another benefit at least from a distra maintainers point of view or a IT administrators point of view Meetable distros are easier to deploy and maintain because every image that they come up with after an update can then be pushed out to every single machine that they have on their network or you know in the broader wide world and That means that each image that they push out is exactly the same This is why the steam deck uses a version of arch that is immutable They can just push out an update to their system They create a new image like we talked about before and they know because all steam decks are the same that That that image will then run on those machines just like they did on the test machines they had and you know in their labs or whatever so that's one of the aspects of Immutables that are really good for more broader IT enterprise usage of immutable distros the third benefit that people talk about a lot is That immutable distributions make Linux more reliable now We'll talk a little bit later about whether or not this is true But in theory at least because that base level file system is read only it makes it much harder for users to muck about in there and make Problems for themselves when it comes to altering files that they don't know what they're doing or deleting files that they shouldn't be deleting whatever Because if they go in there and they start deleting stuff that they shouldn't all they have to do is reboot and they come right back to the image That was exactly the same when it was functional. So the idea Also in terms of reliability is that because of the sameness of each image that is pushed out to every machine So every version of silver blue is exactly the same Finding bugs and maintaining bugs and pushing out fixes just goes out to everyone Not just the people who decide to update, right? So you're going to each Every machine is going to run the exact same image making it much easier to maintain from a distro Maintain this point of view and then bugs and stuff get get fixed and because the underlying system just doesn't change there you can't have a User file somewhere that Accesses that base level system that makes changes that break things that read only aspect of everything makes the system At least in theory more stable whether or not that's true again is something that we'll talk about here in a minute So let's go ahead then and jump into the disadvantages because there are quite a few disadvantages of Immutable operating systems and the immutable future that we're all facing So the biggest complaint that you're going to hear about Immutable distros is that it's going to take away our freedom, you know freedom, right? That's the big deal and not the free and open source software thing Like you use Linux because it gives you the freedom to do whatever you want And because there is now an aspect of these immutable distros that is read only that you can't change People claim that this takes away their freedoms, right? It takes away their ability to do whatever it is they want with their machines with their distros whatever So this argument is something that I can kind of see both sides of so obviously as someone who's nerdy Someone who likes to tinker with stuff I don't like the idea of there being a part of my system that I can't touch that I basically don't own that part of the system it feels proprietary to me now obviously it's not proprietary But it feels that way it feels like you're using windows because there's parts of wind that there's an Basically all of windows is a read-only file system, but it's not it's it's a it's a Operating system that you can't get in there and access and make changes to and the read-only aspect of an immutable distro Kind of feels like that on the other hand This argument really falls apart if you have some technical knowledge because there are tools out there like you blue And there are several others that allow you to basically create your own distro or your own immutable Image on top of like fedora or a boon to our arch There's several different tools that allow you to do this And if you have that knowledge and your that know how you can create whatever you want So in theory I could go create a Qtile version of silver blue and then that would be the base level image for it for Continuing on and that would be mine. I would choose what packages are there What packages get upgraded everything that you I wanted to do and in theory that's possible, right? So the basic idea that the way I think about this is that immutable distros aren't taking away your freedom They're just moving where your freedom actually exists So if you create your own image everything you want to have on there, it's on there You've made those choices. So instead of your freedom being after you install the Distribution your freedom comes before the ISO is created. So basically you're creating the ISO now It doesn't always work that way Obviously, they're going to be prepackaged things like silver blue like, you know I like micro s that have made the decisions for you Just like you any distribution does like if you just open if you just had installed open so that they've made choices for you the idea though is that on the Mutable distributions the ones that are just normal you can make the changes post install whereas with the whereas with the immutable aspect of Distributions you'd have to make those changes and those choices before the ISO was created So the whole freedom argument can go either way in my mind I personally can like I said see kind of both sides But also a lot of people hear this whole immutable distributions are the future and I probably think that they are I think that more and more distributions are going to have Immutable versions of their distributions. So fedora has an immutable version of their distro. It's called silver blue open Suicide has an immutable version of their distribution. It's called micro s right I'm not sure what Ubuntu is doing in terms of their immutable future But I think they have something called a core OS or something like that I don't know I don't pay attention much to canonical these days But you know every major Linux distributions is going to have a version But that doesn't mean at least anytime soon that the regular old 30 plus year old Linux distribution is going away right the regular stuff is just going to stay here And I think it will stay here for a very long time because a lot of distributions are going to You know just carry on the way they always have been and they'll install how they always have been you'll be able to go Delete the ex the Etsy file as much as you want You could do whatever you want with your your distro And that's just the way those distributions going to work that kind of stuff is going to remain around for a very long time and even if Immutables become like the most popular thing They're still going to be a small Community of disher maintainers and people that create distributions that aren't immutable simply because they're people who don't like immutable systems Right, we know that this is true because system D has become the predominant and knit system You know on Linux, right? It's the thing that most distributions use But because there are some people out there that don't like system D You know they've created their own in it systems run it open RC system in it all these things are some of the At least since we need was created before System B, but the idea there is that they're still maintained because they offer an alternative to system D Right, so the same thing would happen with mutable distros if Immutable distros were to become very very popular at least in my opinion Another aspect of this whole freedom thing is that you don't have easy access to the system files on immutable distra Meaning that installing and working with apps and files that need access to that type of data is much harder But they've created workarounds for this kind of thing, right? So they've created tools like distra box like toolbox that allow you to create environments That are mutable meaning that they have they give you all the freedom that you want and you have full access to every part of the system You create that environment with those tools and then you can do basically whatever you want And these tools have become so powerful that you can you know basically install Arch Linux on fedora And use it in a container or in a virtualized environment and do whatever it is you want on there without having to have access to The baseline read-only file system of silver blue or whatever immutable distribution you're using so as Immutable distribution has become more popular Especially in the Linux desktop space in the broader community More and more of these tools are going to be created that make it much easier for you to Claw back some of the freedom you thought was being taken away from you another disadvantage to Immutable distributions is the reliance on containerized software and this is going to be one this I At one point would probably have agreed with but I don't agree with any more Basically what it means is that if you're going to install software on your distribution chances are you're going to be using flat pack or Snaps or something to do it because that's the main way of Getting packages on this type of system, right and that's for good reason, right? one of the biggest aspects as we talked about of immutable distributions is that it offers you the security of being Containerized in terms of the base level system files are containerized and non-accessible by anything, right? If they're read-only flat packs and snaps kind of go hand-in-hand with that being that they're containerized and don't have Access to anything else. They're all very self contained containers if you will of Programs that can just operate it on their own without access to other parts of the system Now obviously there are downsides to flat packs and snaps like that But we don't have to get into those we've covered those ad nauseam on this channel and every other YouTube Every other YouTube channel has covered them as well But if you don't like containerized Applications chances are you're not going to like immutable distributions now It doesn't mean that you can't install other Non-containerized applications on your system you can of course do that but it requires a little bit of a hurdle in order to do it so it is a Something that keep in mind if that's what you're kind of considering like if you don't like flat packs chances are you're not No, like silver blue because that's where most of your applications you're probably going to come from now the biggest downside of Immutable distributions at least as I see it is that it's harder to explain the benefits of immutable file systems and immutable distributions To regular Linux desktop users So the benefits for IT administrators for large corporations for people who have multiple computers in their house or on their bit in their business or whatever The the benefits for those guys are much easier to explain because it's you know Hey, you can have this one image of a distribution You can just push it out all your machines and you know all your machine works and work and it's read only so your Employees can't go in there and start mucking about you know the benefits for that type of situation are much easier to explain But for you and me the benefits are a little bit more Superfluous, right? They're they're not as easy to explain simply because most of them still do apply mostly at least it feels like to those larger Enterprise corporate industrial applications if I were to have to explain what the benefits are to a regular Small time one computer in their house Linux desktop user my biggest answer my best answer for that would be stability because I Do personally think that an immutable distribution has the potential to be more stable than immutable distribution Now it doesn't mean that it's always true You can obviously have problems come in when it you know, you know, they push a package of pipe wire I don't know why I'm picking on pipe wire But you know they push a package of pipe wire out and it breaks your audio, right? I talked about this before You know so things can go wrong It's you know Linux. It's technology stuff happens, right? but the the ability to Have an image break on you and then go back to an old image that you know works is a phenomenal Safety net for a lot of people and because it is set up out of the box It means that every day regular users can use it without a lot of hassle Whereas if you were to install arch Linux, but it's not immutable But you've used the butter fs file system and you've installed snapper and you got all this stuff set up You know, it's something that you have to actively do if you were to use silver blue The ability to go back to an image that you know works is just built into the system and you can just go back You can boot into it and it just works just fine There's no necessary user intervention or setup on the part of silver blue in order to get the really cool backup system For those base level files to work really well for you so if an update comes in and does break your system going back to a workable system is very very easy that means that you can Have your distro install on your computer for a longer period of time And you don't have to worry about things breaking because if something does break you just go back to the image that worked So that means the stability overall is probably the biggest argument For the small-time Linux desktop user when it comes to immutable distributions and now my overall opinion on immutable distros has shifted over the course of the last few months and The biggest thing that has changed is that when it first heard what an immutable system was Before I knew all the details and stuff like that that I know now. I wasn't the whole you're taking away my freedom camp, right? I I I definitely did not like the fact that there was a part of my system on my system my system mine that I didn't have access to that I didn't have read and write and Ownership capabilities over those files, right? It felt like they were taking away my ownership a part of my My Linux and I don't I didn't like that right that feeling was icky to me because it was Antithetical to everything that Linux is supposed to represent right it's supposed to be that you install Linux This is your thing right sure you didn't make it but because of the licenses that exist when it comes to open-source software I have a ISO of Arch Linux I can do whatever I want with that ISO of Arch Linux all the way down to the littlest bit and bite Right, I can do whatever I want if if I have the technological knowledge to go in there and make changes and make my Own distro based on Arch Linux. I can do that and anybody can do that We know anybody can do that because there are 12,000 different arch-based distros out there Maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea right with immutable systems when I first heard of them It felt like they were taking that ability away, right? It felt like they were taking some of that ownership and capability away But since I've learned more about it It doesn't feel like that any more to me now that I know that you can go create your own Immutable image of you know using Qtile or i3 or whatever you could do that if you have the technological knowledge to do So that just means that you have to have a little bit more user input in the creation of the ISO whereas usually you just go grab an ISO and then you can make the changes afterwards Here you just make the changes beforehand and then you can install it right so obviously there's more There there is a little bit more knowledge that is needed in order to do that then making changes afterwards But you can still see how the freedom is still there It's just kind of moved to a different place right and that's just kind of the way that I've looked at it So that's kind of removed my argument against The immutable aspect of the future right because we still do have the the freedom to do the things that we want Also, then the mutable distributions aren't going away So it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it did when I first heard about them now The question would I use an immutable distribution? Yeah, I think that I probably would I think I'd probably be pretty happy with it right now I'm using Arch but if I were to break this system again, please Lord don't let me jinx it. I really don't want it to install everything again But the point point is if and when this distro breaks or because I broke it You know usually that's what happens when I break this distro I could see myself going to an immutable operating system But I would definitely want to have that control beforehand so they can choose what desktop environment or window manager I have installed all this stuff and you know There are many really cool things that you can do with an immutable system that I didn't cover in the video So things like if you have several different images on Your particular distribution that all work and they all have different desktop environments So you could rebase your system from a GNOME system to a KDE system very easily if you wanted to if it's set up to do So if you wanted to rebase from a KDE system to a Qtel version or whatever you could do so right and That ability is something that gives you it's like a different form of freedom Whereas you know like if you wanted to install KDE and GNOME on your state on your distro now There's gonna be a lot of conflicting files But because those two images with GNOME and KDE are separate you just boot into one or boot into the other and you can you know You'll have yourself a system where you have both and you don't have the traditional problems You have a usually when you do have both so that's immutable distros I hope I did a fairly good job of explaining what this actually means now I will 100% say and I should have said this at the beginning, but I am a noob when it comes to this I I definitely have done more research than I had at the beginning So I do understand more of it than ever before but that doesn't mean that I can't be wrong I'm wrong all the time I tried to do a fairly good job of Doing the research for this and trying to make sure that I said things in the proper order You know sometimes words are hard. So if I misexplained something I do apologize I'm going to in the video description below Leave a link to several of the articles that I read to learn the things that I learned That do a much better job of explaining the things that I learned than I did when I tried to teach you Wow Anyways, that's it for this video if you have thoughts on immutable distributions You can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on master down or Odyssey those links will be in the video description I also have or I'm also a part of a peer-tube instance So that link will be in the video description as well if you want to go watch all my videos on Peer-tube. I think the most recent four or five maybe seven videos are always on there It's not all of the Linux or the Linux cast But the most recent ones are there if you want to go watch my stuff on peer-tube You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast links for liberapay and YouTube in the video description as well if you want to support me there Thanks everybody does support me on page on YouTube you guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the chance to not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate you guys. You're all just absolutely awesome So thank you so much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time