Debian becomes immutable – GNU / Linux.ch

Saturday, April 1, 2023, Ralph Hersel

Immutable distributions are the direction that drives it Fedora Silver Blue Launched. The KDE Plasma variant followed shortly thereafter Fedora Kenwit. But also the sizes of other distributions, such as openSUSE Don’t be fooled. In addition to well-known distributions, newer distributions are also jumping on the bandwagon, such as vanilla OS. Even Canonical follows their IoT platform Ubuntu Core This trend.

What are fixed distributions?

Formally, an immutable Linux operating system (also known as immutable infrastructure or immutable deployment) is an operating system designed to be immutable and read-only. This means that system files and directories cannot be modified after the operating system is installed. Any changes made to the system are temporary and will be lost upon system restart. Think of the system as a snapshot of a standard Linux system that cannot be modified. Any updates or changes are made by creating a new instance of the operating system, publishing it, and switching to the new instance.

Although the release date of the mother of all distributions, Debian 12 “bookwormNot yet known, Debian is keeping a close eye on what’s happening in the GNU/Linux community. This morning, Technical Committee of the project decided to start with Debian 13″TrixieTo provide immutable editing.

The Debian project justifies this step as follows:

With Trixie, we mark the beginning of a new era in the Debian project. Debian 13 looks, feels, and behaves like a normal desktop operating system and the experience is identical to using any of the previous Debian releases.

However, unlike previous versions, Trixie will not be changeable. This means that every installation is identical to every other installation of the same version. The operating system on the hard drive is exactly the same from computer to computer and does not change with use.

Trixie’s stable design aims to make it more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop. Trixie’s stable architecture also makes it an excellent platform for containerized applications and container-based software development. In any case, applications and containers are kept separate from the host system, which improves stability and reliability.

Trixie core technologies have some other useful features. OS updates are fast and there are no waiting times for installation: a normal restart is sufficient to use the next version. With Trixie it is also possible to roll back to the previous version of the operating system if something goes wrong.

The entire Debian team is proud to have taken this important step with the community.

Technical details of Debian 13 “Trixie” are not yet known at this early stage of development. Let’s wait and see how well Bookworm does before moving on to a milestone in Debian history. I suppose we’ll be able to write more about this in the second half of the year.

source: Debian Technical Council