Not really an Installation issue; moving to Arch Discussion.
Very useful for me.
]]>the pacman database staying in /var created some difficulties, but I was able to work around it successfully (my own machine today is entirely transactional) it would be easier if it stayed in /usr like opensuse
only grub is supported, to keep even the kernel included in transactions
currently, i'm using subvolume name to do the transaction, but this causes a certain risk: if power goes out, during the name change, and it does not complete, root is inconsistent, and won't start from any known state,
I need grub with opensuse's btrfs_relative_path patch to proceed, and I welcome any help you can give me on the repository itself
english is not my first language
]]>so somehow they have the packagekit backend using transactional-update behind the scenes, maybe via the zypper backend or a custom backend.
]]>On reboot will be in new snapshot, but you can roll back to the old one. There are interesting questions here about how to manage updates to /etc - are they are part of these transactional updates as well? Silverlight keeps /etc independent of the snapshots, I don't understand how exactly they interact with MicroOS.
The transactional update code for MicroOS is here:
https://github.com/openSUSE/transactional-update
I think it's fairly tightly integrated with zypper, but I haven't looked closely yet. In the latest version, they have a new command, `pkcon`, that can be used to install packages in the new transaction without using tukit/transactional-update commands at all. I am not sure where the source for this is. In any case from a user perspective it behaves more like rpm-ostree.
]]>which has not been updated since 2015. Following links from his blog, there is a project on github that is still maintained and possible related: https://github.com/cleanroom-team/cleanroom
I tried out Silverblue and MicroOS Desktop (Gnome Edition). Silverblue is more polished, but I think the MicroOS approach is more flexible (downside is it requires btrfs). For both of them, and a hypothetical Arch based version, I would like to see full GUI management possible via GNOME Software or KDE Discover, i.e. so I can give it to a non-technical friend or family member. Having to use a command line tool for main system updates and a GUI tool for flatpaks is a bit confusing. The later is easy for a non-technical user, but the command line stuff not so much. I guess figuring out how to layer into the immutable base in a user friendly way is not obvious.
]]>As an avid Arch Linux user, I have had my eye on immutable distributions (Silverblue, MicroOS etc.) lately. I know about making root read-only, chattr, and DArch [https://godarch.com]; But I am wondering what people have attempted to have a proper immutable Arch Linux like MicroOS? I would like to hear your ideas.
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