Just finished installing it in a VMware Workstation VM:<p>* The installer lags unless you temporarily disable 3D acceleration until open-vm-tools are installed<p>* The Norwegian keyboard layout defaults to Dvorak, which I suspect isn't the most common one ;)<p>* The default installer resolution was a tiny 800x600. Click Activities and type Displays to get to the relevant settings.<p>Now for the more exciting stuff, like testing if Tailscale works out of the box.
It is great to see immutable distributions becoming more popular. One thing that Ubuntu does very well however is the 5-year standard support for LTS releases (up to 10 years available via extended support).<p>I wasn't able to find any information on VanillaOS's support roadmap. Since the project's goal is to have stability of the underlying OS, it would be great if VanillaOS had an LTS-like support plan in mind.
Another approach I miss from SmartOS.<p>It boots from a USB stick, loads system to a RAM disk, mounts configuration from a directory, and then hosts VM zones from ZFS datasets. The “root” system remains immutable.<p>To patch or upgrade, you just write a new system image to the USB stick and reboot. It’s great.<p>To skip the USB stick, you can do the whole thing over PXE.<p>After running a cluster on SmartOS for many years, moving back to Linux and <i>installing</i> the OS feels fragile, dirty, and weird.
I'm surprised immutable systems aren't more popular.<p>Back in the Knoppix days it was first a novelty, and then a blessing
that you had to boot from a CD-ROM, because it led to one amazing
outcome:<p>Less tinkering.<p>Or rather - it split <i>use</i> from tinkering.<p>Systems today are designed around the principles of deferral and
volatility. You can add or change anything at any time. The user has
absolute freedom to tinker, but also the vendor of always-connected
products has endless possibilities to update. The result is a mess of
dissatisfaction and half-bakery. Nothing is ever finished or fully
right. It also, maybe paradoxically, leads to systems that feel less
under your control.<p>Systems like TinyCore and Live CD distros take a different approach
that the OS is <i>finished</i>. You have two choices, take it or leave it.<p>Unless you are prepared to cross a non-trivial barrier to remix and
update the non-volatile image, you are forced to just use what you
have. That leads to more productivity because you adapt to the tool
rather than constantly adapting the tool to you.<p>I like TinyCore because it's looking to a middle ground of baking
immutable systems at key stage points and keeping changes separate
from the immutable core. I can change the core if I want to, but
rarely.<p>I see that as a separate prospect than "appliance platforms" like
Android and a PhoneOS onto which you can only load "apps".<p>What ideas and favourite solutions do other's have for using
immutability, or not liking it?
I noticed it lets you pick a primary package format to use, I just want a centralized package manager that highlights where my package came from or what format its in. I dont care if I use 5 different approaches thats already quite typical.<p>What I do want to know is what package format is best for my use case: I want latest version of Python and other packages, and I am on Ubuntu, I dont want a new OS or docker. No idea which would be ideal or the pros and cons of each.
Sounds like the only immutable part is the non-writable filesystem of the root partition, which is updated by having a live and non-live copy (A/B partitions) with the live updating the non-live and then switching on reboot. Similar to how Android works with its read-only partitions.<p>From a whole filesystem perspective I think it's not accurate to call this immutable though, as you can presumably work around this with bind mounts that can be used to mutate (but not persist) any part of the read-only filesystem while the system is still running.
NanoBSD<p>If you like VanillaOS, you’d like <a href="https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/nanobsd/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/nanobsd/</a>
A small "operation" note: immutable is an was an ancient kind-of dream, having something that's always in a known state even if it's run for significant amount of time. Formally it should give easy debug due to a real and substantial reproducibility.<p>In practice it never works well though: first immutable means far longer to update and these days updates are a continuous stream, secondly even if the system is really immutable the complete infra tend to be not, making the immutable part next to useless in reproducibility terms.<p>In modern terms a new concept born "idempotent" witch FORMALLY means "you can run it countless of time, it will works the same and do not even re-do already done steps, it ensure consistency of a system final state no matter the initial one". Such concept have more more practical applications, again in theory, but in practice it fail to be really idempotent beside trivial use cases. From mere Ansible Playbooks for an infra to NixOS idempotence is partially there but results tend to be not.<p>Long story short: IMVHO the road have a name DAMN SIMPLER DESIGN, simpler infra, as the sole way to keep anything working and easy to restore when it does not.<p>A bottomline: reproducibility for a server infra have some reasons, for desktops... Well... IMO it's a bit overrated in the era of "endpoint".
Just tried to install it in qemu and the installer was broken. It couldn't select the vda disk (the selection was disabled). There was no way to proceed further.
> Vanilla OS is an immutable operating system, core parts of the system are locked down to prevent unwanted changes and corruption from third-party applications or a faulty update.<p>Can't imagine the HN responses if this was Windows marketing text :)
> core parts of the system are locked down to prevent unwanted changes and corruption from third-party applications or a faulty update.<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they just mean they mount the root filesystem as read-only, and have a separate partition for /var and /tmp ?<p>That's a reasonable idea, although I'm not sure it merits an entire distribution. Is there anything else to Vanilla or is it just this?<p>> The GNOME Desktop is the perfect environment for your daily tasks<p>Maybe if you're a GNOME developer, and even then I kind of doubt it.<p>> designed to be a reliable<p>But it's based on ubuntu, which uses systemd, which is something not to be relied on, in many respects; see:
<a href="https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Arguments_against_systemd/" rel="nofollow">https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Arguments_aga...</a>