Post #3937762

2026-07-19 16:13 UTC

CachyOS does this just fine with bootable BTRFS snapshots before and after each update, without forcing me to use Flatpaks that don’t support all of the features of the normal apps or else break the immutability. For example, it’s not possible to get all Discord features working in Flatpak (even with tinkering) due to inherent limitations of Flatpak.

Replies (2)

@hperrin@lemmy.ca 2026-07-19 16:51

Yeah, a file system snapshot is another way of achieving safe upgrades. There are upsides and downsides of all approaches though. Rolling back to a btrfs snapshot is harder than just picking the other ostree image in GRUB. And you still have the problem where old binaries might be running when only the new binaries/libraries exist on disk. But it also saves space on disk compared to an immutable distro, and it’s much easier to make changes to system files. Every approach is a compromise.

Open ##3938298
@marcie@lemmy.ml 2026-07-19 17:02

The real problem is config drift. You have to maintain a lot of little fixes over time as you operate Linux. I’ve run fedora atomic (and rebased to bazzite when it got fairly big) since it launched with only one relatively minor hiccup that was resolved by a single line in terminal (rpm-ostree rebase). You can layer stuff over it to modify the base image and clear it if something breaks, manually removing critical packages and being sure to clear every file would be a nightmare on any other distro.

Open ##3938463