by bketelsen on 12/31/22, 9:54 AM with 124 comments
by bakoo on 12/31/22, 10:27 AM
* The installer lags unless you temporarily disable 3D acceleration until open-vm-tools are installed
* The Norwegian keyboard layout defaults to Dvorak, which I suspect isn't the most common one ;)
* The default installer resolution was a tiny 800x600. Click Activities and type Displays to get to the relevant settings.
Now for the more exciting stuff, like testing if Tailscale works out of the box.
by presto8 on 12/31/22, 3:46 PM
I wasn't able to find any information on VanillaOS's support roadmap. Since the project's goal is to have stability of the underlying OS, it would be great if VanillaOS had an LTS-like support plan in mind.
by jmbwell on 12/31/22, 4:29 PM
It boots from a USB stick, loads system to a RAM disk, mounts configuration from a directory, and then hosts VM zones from ZFS datasets. The “root” system remains immutable.
To patch or upgrade, you just write a new system image to the USB stick and reboot. It’s great.
To skip the USB stick, you can do the whole thing over PXE.
After running a cluster on SmartOS for many years, moving back to Linux and installing the OS feels fragile, dirty, and weird.
by nonrandomstring on 12/31/22, 11:26 AM
Back in the Knoppix days it was first a novelty, and then a blessing that you had to boot from a CD-ROM, because it led to one amazing outcome:
Less tinkering.
Or rather - it split use from tinkering.
Systems today are designed around the principles of deferral and volatility. You can add or change anything at any time. The user has absolute freedom to tinker, but also the vendor of always-connected products has endless possibilities to update. The result is a mess of dissatisfaction and half-bakery. Nothing is ever finished or fully right. It also, maybe paradoxically, leads to systems that feel less under your control.
Systems like TinyCore and Live CD distros take a different approach that the OS is finished. You have two choices, take it or leave it.
Unless you are prepared to cross a non-trivial barrier to remix and update the non-volatile image, you are forced to just use what you have. That leads to more productivity because you adapt to the tool rather than constantly adapting the tool to you.
I like TinyCore because it's looking to a middle ground of baking immutable systems at key stage points and keeping changes separate from the immutable core. I can change the core if I want to, but rarely.
I see that as a separate prospect than "appliance platforms" like Android and a PhoneOS onto which you can only load "apps".
What ideas and favourite solutions do other's have for using immutability, or not liking it?
by Squarex on 12/31/22, 10:25 AM
by giancarlostoro on 12/31/22, 4:54 PM
What I do want to know is what package format is best for my use case: I want latest version of Python and other packages, and I am on Ubuntu, I dont want a new OS or docker. No idea which would be ideal or the pros and cons of each.
by spicyusername on 12/31/22, 3:23 PM
by fdiof on 12/31/22, 1:11 PM
From a whole filesystem perspective I think it's not accurate to call this immutable though, as you can presumably work around this with bind mounts that can be used to mutate (but not persist) any part of the read-only filesystem while the system is still running.
by eismcc on 12/31/22, 2:03 PM
by tiffanyh on 12/31/22, 3:42 PM
If you like VanillaOS, you’d like https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/nanobsd/
by kkfx on 12/31/22, 4:03 PM
In practice it never works well though: first immutable means far longer to update and these days updates are a continuous stream, secondly even if the system is really immutable the complete infra tend to be not, making the immutable part next to useless in reproducibility terms.
In modern terms a new concept born "idempotent" witch FORMALLY means "you can run it countless of time, it will works the same and do not even re-do already done steps, it ensure consistency of a system final state no matter the initial one". Such concept have more more practical applications, again in theory, but in practice it fail to be really idempotent beside trivial use cases. From mere Ansible Playbooks for an infra to NixOS idempotence is partially there but results tend to be not.
Long story short: IMVHO the road have a name DAMN SIMPLER DESIGN, simpler infra, as the sole way to keep anything working and easy to restore when it does not.
A bottomline: reproducibility for a server infra have some reasons, for desktops... Well... IMO it's a bit overrated in the era of "endpoint".
by rodolphoarruda on 12/31/22, 1:23 PM
by alexeiz on 1/1/23, 7:05 AM
by lostmsu on 12/31/22, 11:44 PM
by leke on 12/31/22, 4:52 PM
by Yasuraka on 12/31/22, 2:28 PM
by lloydatkinson on 12/31/22, 7:40 PM
by hestefisk on 1/1/23, 3:12 AM
by sedatk on 12/31/22, 6:36 PM
Can't imagine the HN responses if this was Windows marketing text :)
by dengolius on 12/31/22, 6:15 PM
by meatjuice on 12/31/22, 11:27 AM
by fbnlsr on 12/31/22, 11:46 AM
by einpoklum on 12/31/22, 1:08 PM
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they just mean they mount the root filesystem as read-only, and have a separate partition for /var and /tmp ?
That's a reasonable idea, although I'm not sure it merits an entire distribution. Is there anything else to Vanilla or is it just this?
> The GNOME Desktop is the perfect environment for your daily tasks
Maybe if you're a GNOME developer, and even then I kind of doubt it.
> designed to be a reliable
But it's based on ubuntu, which uses systemd, which is something not to be relied on, in many respects; see: https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Arguments_aga...