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by JHonaker 1212 days ago
OpenSUSE MicroOS is basically built around the idea of an "immutable" (read disincentivized to change) core while the majority of user space runs in a Podman container.

It was originally developed as an absolute minimal distro for running containers on servers, but the immutable desktop movement led them to develop a desktop user-facing variant.

Other ideas that are very similar: Fedora SilverBlue (very similar, more mature) and VanillaOS (based on Flatpak insteak of Podman/Docker, very new)

3 comments

If you install openSUSE these days during setup you have the option to set up the company as a "transactional server" with this immutable environment. I love that writing to /usr/bin fails with read-only file system. It's implemented as a read-only btrfs snapshot.
I'm sorry what these means?, can you explaine it again whit more details?
It's already well-explained in the linked article:

> OpenSUSE MicroOS has a read-only root file system, using Btrfs. Transactional updates are handled by a SUSE-specific wrapper script around the package manager zypper, transactional-update. This creates a new Btrfs snapshot of the root file system and then performs an update of the system. If the installation was successful, the script marks the new snapshot as the default snapshot. On errors, the snapshot is discarded and the previous one remains as the default. A reboot activates the new snapshot.

My comment above was saying that you don't have to use MicroOS per se to get this. A regular openSUSE install supports the transactional server role that does the same thing as MicroOS.

I think in your original comment maybe there is a slightly confusing typo? Is “company“ supposed to actually be “computer” or something like that?
Don't forget Fedora CoreOS, Fedora's actual container-distro! Silverblue/Kinoite are desktop distributions.

The idea and execution is very similar to MicroOS, both on the desktop and on the server. Immutability isn't as scary as it sounds, highly recommend checking it out.

No webgui though, that has to come from another project...

A small correction: Fedora Silverblue & co is highly Flatpak based, and the VanillaOS 'package manager' is Distrobox under the hood, which is a project for running full linux distros inside podman containers intended for desktop users.