Huge shootout to the Distrobox devs, you saved my day :)
I brew beer as a hobby. I’ve been using Joliebulle 3 for close to 10 years because it’s FOSS and super simple to use, and I’m too lazy to switch to another brewing app. It’s been unmaintained for almost 5 years, but it wonderfully does exactly what I want from a brewing software. I was missing this crucial “piece of equipment” since I migrated to Fedora.
Brew day is tomorrow. I forgot to look into it until it was almost too late.
I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.
I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.
I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).
I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.
The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.
I run zfs on my (two) Debian boxes (a thinkpad x1 and a home server). Installing it as the root filesystem was a bit tricky but once it’s done it has been flawless for me. I run the server using 2 ssd in mirror for /etc and all those, and then a couple disks in raidz for data. When one of the root disks died I just swapped it and re synced and was up and running in not time. Unfortunately the laptop only has a single ssd so if that dies I have to reinstall and restore from a backup.
The cool thing is that I can just take a snapshot before messing around and the restore if anything breaks. It has been a really nice experience and I recommend it! I know it’s not the same as an immutable distro, and I tried silverblue but it’s too different from what I’m used to :-)
Silverblue + ZFS would be a match made in heaven, unfortunately Fedora makes it really hard to do ZFS reliably, too many kernel updates that break ZFS. This would be an even bigger nightmare on Silverblue given the distribution model.
If only ZFS was part of the Linux kernel 😑. maybe one day
So do I. Those damn incompatible licenses.