The State of Immutable Linux (justingarrison.com)

I went all in about a year ago after running microOs for some time. I am pretty happy with the situation, and while I do like the transactional-update way of microos, their immutable desktops have been too much work for me. Kalpa is alpha, and aeon runs gnome. I tried for a year, but one day I had enough and installed kinoite and haven't looked back (although I have been looking at Aurora).

Since you never touch the base system, you get more or less a rolling release distro, since updating between fedora versions becomes even simpler.

> It’s 2026, if you’re not using something immutable (or at least reproducable) you’re doing more maintenance work than you should.

I used to use MicroOS on Raspberry Pis and NUCs but the rolling release actually led to more maintenance work (fixing breaking changes like config changes). Eventually I moved to Ubuntu but kept the mindset that all installed applications should be podman containers. I don't miss MicroOS...

Glad to see Talos Linux there!

Another interesting, though less radical take on an immutable container OS is IncusOS. Made by the same people behind LXC: https://github.com/lxc/incus-os

I wish the article's NixOS section had mentioned impermanence features which can be used to make NixOS actually immutable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence

I always thought the best idea was having the OS in ROM.

You have https://rancher.github.io/elemental-toolkit/docs/ also

Aw, no love for Arkane Linux (<https://www.arkanelinux.org/>)? It seems a bit more 'properly immutable' than the 'distributinos' listed in TFA.

NixOS can be all of these things given a nix expression to make it so

So which one is recommended for running on servers in production?