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Comment by swaits | Hacker News Reader

Been running Kinoite for a good bit (~1 year). I'm a bit over it. Love the idea of immutability, but rebooting every time I get a new system image via rpm-ostree, which is often, is tiresome. Of course, I could update less frequently; alas, habits formed from years of using rolling releases.

I switched to EndeavourOS. Between flatpak and brew and mise, I have relatively well sandboxed applications. This gives me most of the benefits of the immutable OSes, although nowhere near as rigorous, obviously. For a technologist, though, it's fine.

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You might be interested in Serpent OS, which offers immutability but without reboots after each upgrade.

https://serpentos.com/

They just hit their first alpha release, but it has been under development for years already. They focus on rust-based tooling, so even their coreutils are the rust versions instead of GNU. I read the alpha announcement yesterday, and might give it a spin later next year.

So far I've been very happy with Kinoite. I upgrade the base system once a week, but everything is installed in my Arch based container, so updates are fast and do not require a reboot.

On my workstation I use the Aurora Linux, a spin of Kinoite with extra tools such as tailscale added to the base image. On that machine I haven't needed to use rpm-ostree at all.

https://getaurora.dev/

Thanks for pointing met to Serpent!

I gave Aurora a quick spin before going back to Endeavour. Didn’t work well for me.

So, from a userland perspective, you are actually running Arch.

Arch, Nix, Debian, Fedora and Windows. Just switch between them from the terminal new tab menu.

If one container breaks, just dump the list of installed packages and start over. The base system is rock solid.

Very cool that they ship with COSMIC as a DE option. Love using Clang as the compiler as well.

The whole point of ostree is that your systems image has a minimal amount of stuff in it, a la you’re only doing upgrades when there is a kernel update (which is essentially impossible to avoid rebooting for no matter what OS you’re using, even SerpentOS the other commenter linked can’t do kexec updates).

You use something like distrobox to use a rolling release with regular package updates on the atomic core.

I understand the point of it. I’m enthusiastic about it. It was my home daily drive for more than a year. In the end, the pain didn’t outweigh the benefits for me.

I think we're closer to the time where live updates are more feasible if you aren't changing the kernel although a log in/out might be required.

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