Say a friend is looking for a new system, and said person is not particularly savvy with technology, what system would you point them toward?
Say a friend is looking for a new system, and said person is not particularly savvy with technology, what system would you point them toward?
I don’t get the appeal of immutability. System files are read-only for users for a reason already. Don’t modify them as root unless you know what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.
What am I missing?
(Also gaming for a 78 year old, meh.)
Making them immutable for everyone protects users who enter their password in prompts without thinking.
How can the system be upgraded at all if not even the root user has access though?
The updater downloads an updated copy of your root system and saves it next to the one you’re running.
When you reboot the next time, the bootloader boots from that new system image.
Userspace applications are installed as flatpaks and sit in a writeable directory.
And “the updater” is what? A program running as [not root]? How does it have write access if nothing does?
It’s the package manager. And it doesn’t have write access to your installed root either.
It doesn’t change anything on your installed file system at all, it installs a new system next to it.
So it installs a whole new filesystem? Interesting. That feels like it sets limitations on how well you can take advantage of the full space of your hard drive.
And this action can only be performed by the package manager running under some magical God user that sits above root? Or some other mechanism?
It utilizes the copy-on-write functionality of the BTRFS file system.
So it doesn’t need double the disk space, it only actually writes the differences between your installed system and the new one.
And it runs normally with sudo, not some special god user.
You could do it manually, too.
So root still has write access to the system then, gotcha. Then it’s not really immutable per se, the package manager just has a different way of writing to the filesystem that simulates immutability, I guess?
What you’re missing is that the question was what would you recommend to the average user.
Exactly, so there should be no reason to edit sensitive system files in either case. Great, further to my point.
Okay? I don’t understand this reaction in this context. I’m just making statements lol. Not yelling at you.
I’m not an immutable guy, but from what I heard it’s more of a way to address programs and dependency hell, less the user modifying system code. Correct me if I am wrong