ABRoot Reinvents The Immutable Linux Distro

certainly interesting and a great project. i just am hoping to have something with similar functionality based on more flexible btrfs or zfs snapshots. that can then be rolled back etc. so i am wondering now since we can already do that on other setups (before abroot came along) if the functionality provided by ab root does or does not indeed offer anything worthwhile above that. which a snapshots based system did not already offer?

This is really interesting. It also means no need for "systemd offline updates" on startup.

A little correction, most distros do not use OSTree. Silverblue is just the most popular one out there, but Kinoite is essentially a flavor of it. openSUSE MicroOS uses btrfs directly and NixOS do their own thing. Those are a few examples I can think of.

Speaking of which, does anyone know how VanillaOS is holding up? Back when it first launched, I heard some talk about it being unstable or not installing properly for a lot of people.

I'm not really sure I understand the benefits of an immutable system still. I've heard a lot of discussion about "more stability" and such but I don't see what the difference would be between say, updating packages normally on Ubuntu or updating an immutable Ubuntu installation which will be made out of those exact same packages.

While I DO on the other hand understand that some people mess with their system which could cause stability problems, you don't really need to run a special immutable distro for that. You can just.. not mess with your system. If I'm wrong about this I'd love for someone to correct me on the benefits of an immutable system.

For example, what would be the point of me running Fedora Silverblue if I could just run regular Fedora and only install flatpaks. Wouldn't that be nearly the same thing?

This is actually how most android phones work nowadays, its pretty nice and helped me out a couple of times when messing up flashing a new os

Linux is slowly turning into Android and that's just about the worst thing for something as great as Linux.

i hope that the growth in immutable distro market share is an additional growth and isn't stolen from the market share of non-immutable distros.
because as a guy who runs linux for personal use only, i found this immutably thing really cumbersome, and i don't want it to become the future of linux in general.

It would be super nice if you could do a tour of these new distro-agnostic software installation methods.

Between Flatpak & Co, NixOS, and now Distrobox, there's a lot of choices and it would be nice to do a comparison of these technologies, and where they're best used 🙂

Im using this on btrfs. "infinity" root version, single partition.
Pac-base create new root, and run operation, if sucess, set to next boot, if failed, destroy. Simple shell script over grub, pacman and btrfs, in Vanilla (😉) ArchLinux
Configs mounted on boot using overlayfs fs, edit /etc noot need reboot.
Ghub vmath3us stateless-arch

this ABRoot seems like Androids A/B partitioning but different

Skib d di

I wonder what would ABroot + overlayFS would look like.

Yeah, ABRoot is what convinced me that VanillaOS will be the distro for me. It was really annoying to work with immutable distro before, you have to really understand or get really in-depth. With ABRoot, most of the same commands and tweaks you usually do can be done in abroot shell, but there's more safeguard in case of issues. THAT is what Windows Updates should have been.

Windows Updates made me left Windows 10, the glibc and grub issue made me not want to deal with Arch anymore, and a solution for update is what convince me to keep an eye on Vanilla OS. Now I'm just waiting for the KDE edition to switch to it.

It is kind of funny to imagine how I'd probably never left Windows if they have this system though. Would have been better than the stupid WINDOWS.OLD backup method they had too.

On the note of what also needed to be installed on root, from what I saw Docker still need to be done via abroot shell, getting zsh by default for host and container is sorta easier if you have zsh in host, and I'm pretty sure there are networking stuff that you'd want to do on root (like installing GUI VPN and firewall). But yeah, not that much, with Apx, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, Conty, and Junest being a thing.

Not sure about the aspect of the two roots automatically being synced (if I’m getting that aspect correctly) - what if an update breaks something? You have nothing to go back to.

Looks like something that play nice with nixpkgs

Isn't this the exact same system android uses?

Seems like Linux is catching up with Google's A/B system partition implementation used on newer Android phones to do seamless system updates, but used for noobie distros where the devs don't want users randomly breaking elements of the root partition.

But honestly, I'm just gonna stay with the likes of Arch, Gentoo and Void as I personally like goofing around with my expert distros.

That is precisely what Android has been doing since always. Good to see a linux desktop os finally adopt this update model!

all of this seems over engineered and will further obfuscate how technology works and make it harder for users to modify things.

What if the sync fails?

I'm still convinced that MicroOS is immutable done right.

I didn't know you can immutable be rooted.

And now blendOS comes around the corner and does the same in a different way and based in Arch.
Can you take a look at it?
Crazy and exciting times for Linux Desktop

Well, I just checked and my OS install takes 8.1GiB. I guess with a whole DE it would definitely be bigger, but still… Drivers really don't take much space.

(this is after more then a year of daily using this machine)

If universal package formats are the future, a lot of printers aren't going to work.

Yeah, keep abroot for hardware stuff, like drivers, drives, and other hardware-related stuff (e.g., correcting screen backlight issues). DistroBox has you covered for regular packages.

If I'm understanding this correct sounds like it would be great on arch for updates.

ABRoot is what modern Android uses to manage system updates actually!
Even cooler, if you have an A/B compatible device (99.9% post-2017 android devices) and you try hard enough, you can create a C (common) partition and dualboot your Android phone, there's a cool project for the OnePlus 7/Pro/T that does it and I use it, it's very handy since this gives me the ability of testing a distro or an update in a live environment before updating my main partition (basically it removes the automatic part of A/B to hand it back to the user)

I don't get the hype. This sounds like windows to me. Wasn't the great thing about linux to have to freedom to break your system?

ABRoot is very much like how things like Linux based routers and embedded devices achieved something similar to immutability since the 90s, it's not a new technique. But it is a bit of a hack, and we have newer solutions now like ostree for a reason.

So it is like what android is doing for a long time. Android does have this kind of root partition system, it is used mainly to prevent android phones from bricking itself when an update fails or interrupted midway though it also makes installing custom rom a PITA. In the past I'm thinking when will linux take advantage of this kind of root partition but I guess finally someone think of this as a good idea....

Thanks for the detailed video!

I’m moved because you explained that they don’t have to install everything in the root 🥲

openSUSE are working on immutable Micro OS

Is it just me that does not like immutable distros ?
Just on principle I like to be able to break shit that I own

Why not a Copy on write file system instead?

So basically rpm-ostree, but you only get two images, and it takes much more space... think I'm going to stay with silverblue for now

Can't wait to see a arch based distro using ABroot.

I hate that the move is to reboot your machine more - I hate offline updates: I want to apply the OS updates, and continue with my life - why do I need to shutdown all my work to get system updates? It didn't use to be that way on Linux.

And before anyone asks - I don't want to reboot at night or even automatically: I have a complex work setup that takes >10 minutes to start and I normally don't reboot for weeks at a time. If there's no important kernel update or a display server update, there's no reason to reboot.

NixOS solves this problem in a much nicer way, with symlinks. Changes are also atomic, but don't require a reboot, and you can keep as many copies of previous states as you want with very little disk usage.

i love the whiteboard in this one.

Only an Aussie gets your thumbnail.....

So, it's like ab partition in Android.

Thank you for this, this is something that 100% needed to be part of the discussion.

Wouldn't this kill an SSD? As it writes the same thing twice

ABRoot is how ChromeOS applies updates.

what's with the abstract art on the whiteboard

else timeshift is a great utility for any distro if you find yourself doing critical changes and tinkering with the system often. ideal for the ordinary distros that can get messed up.

does this mean we can finally rm -rf root without any worries