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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

If I'm able to do everything I can in my regular arch Linux installation, it would be nice to try an arch derivation that is immutable by design.

What I'm affraid is to start experimenting and finding more and more that my workflow is hindered either by some software not working because the architecture of the OS is incompatible, or by KDE UX design choices in the user interface.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be interesting, and it would say nothing about the quality of the software if I'd hit such walls, only that I'm not its target audience.

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I find that I really like using an immutable distro with a custom image (built with github actions).

So I can really separate the system-level changes (in the image, version-controlled) from my user changes.

It's a nixos-like experience without using nix at all.

There have been a couple of things to have in mind, with my Bazzite installation, for creating users or adding groups for example, this pointed me to use systemd-sysusers but it was simple.

I've been wanting to do this! The plan was to modify the Bazzite DX version build script, but ultimately Fedora being base was a deal breaker for me. With KDE Linux this might finally be a dream come true.

It seems like KDE linux uses a different way to provide a system image than ostree on Fedora Silverblue, so I have no idea how easy it is to make changes on top of.

But for Bazzite (and other universal blue distros) you better use BlueBuild

https://blue-build.org/

In the end it's an OCI container image, so you could technically just have a Dockerfile with "FROM bazzite:whatever" at the top, but bluebuild automates the small stuff that you need to do on top of it, and allows you to split your config in files.

You can have a look at my repository to see how easy it is !

https://github.com/LelouBil/Leloublue

Yeah... At this point I would give into Nix for managing the underlying arch system. It's not a gentle learning curve I believe, but at least the community is strong around nix

That's what I use too on Bazzite, custom image for system level stuff, and home-manager for user-level stuff.

The nice thing about Fedora Silverblue's model is that it is literally a container image, so to "build" your image you can run any arbitrary commands, so it's way simpler than nix.

> If I'm able to do everything I can in my regular arch Linux installation

No, you can't.

If you want Arch but with snapshots and rollback, Garuda Linux does that by default. It is not immutable, though.

For snapshots and rollbacks, my backup strategy is enough with Borg. I also take an hourly inventory of the installed packages, so if I need I can go back a maximum of 7 days and a minimum of 2 and see what changed. It's usually enough.

I feel this is a false equivalence.

Atomic updates are not the same thing as backups.

Backups: my file is gone, overwritten, corrupted, I accidentally deleted contents I want... but my computer is working, so I will retrieve a copy from my backup.

Atomic updates: aargh, my computer was half way through installing 150MB of updates across 42 packages, but one file was bad and the update failed, so I rebooted and now it won't boot! No problem, reboot to the boot menu, choose the previous snapshot, a known-good config, and you can boot up and get back to work, until the update is available again.

Didn't say they were equivalent, I've said Borg is enough for me, specially when pacman does a very good job updating the system atomically. In the rarest cases where a pacman update breaks the system, which is usually when the user doesn't have informant installed and forces a failed installation, I'd just chroot from an arch live install disk and fix the OS.

Check out Arkane Linux. Unfortunately the documentation is quite sparse as of yet, but I think it's a very interesting concept.

Thanks for the suggestion. I find it very discouraging to experiment with sparsely documented projects, it feels like you are unwelcome in such projects.

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