TCB13 , 5 months ago

Great post, lots of detailed information for new users. Now I’m gonna tell everyone what you conveniently omitted about what’s driving immutable distros and what your “future” section should’ve looked like.

Immutable distros solve the same problem that was solved years ago with a twist: they’re are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property orchestration and/or repository solution.

We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform in the likes of Docker / Kubernetes. Docker isn’t totally proprietary and there’s Podman but it doesn’t really matter because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term.

“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but again this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere (DockerHub) that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.

People now popularizing immutable distributions clearly haven’t had any experience with it before the current hype. Immutable systems aren’t a new thing we’ve been using them since the raise of MIPS devices (mostly routers and IOTs) and we’ve have been moving to ARM and mutable solutions because they’re objectively better, easier to manage and more reliable.

The RedHat/CentOS fiasco was another great example of these ecosystems and once again all those people who got burned instead of moving to a true open-source distribution such as Debian decided to pick Ubuntu - it’s just a matter of time until Canonical decides to do some move.

Nowadays, without Internet and the ecosystems people can’t even do shit anymore and the current state of things when it comes to embedded development is a great example of this. In the past people were able to program AVR / PIC / Arduino boards offline and today everyone depends on the PlatformIO + VSCode ecosystem to code and deploy to the devices. VSCode is “open-source” until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).

All those things that make development very easy and lowered the bar for newcomers have the dark side of being designed to reconfigure and envelope the way development gets done so someone can profit from it. That is sad and above all set dangerous precedents and creates generations of engineers and developers that don’t have truly open tools like we did.

This is all about commoditizing development - it’s a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes, I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.