I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can’t mess with the root without extra steps.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don’t want to describe it because I am still learning.
My question is: what does the community think of it?
Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?
Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?
Any other input would be appreciated!
Immutable, doesn’t mean extreme secure. It’s a false sense of security.
It could be more secure.
But during a runtime, it is possible to overwrite operational memory, mask some syscalls, etc.
That’s my 3 cents.
Secure can also mean more resilient. The infosec C-I-A triangle has three legs. Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Immutable distros are more resilient and thus offer better availability in the face of attacks or accidents.
I didn’t know that inflation can affect idiomatic expressions.
it doesn’t allow changes to stuff that needs root access to change. If you have root access you can do anything, including switching images. It is not more secure. It’s not less either
Fully agreed. On almost any atomic distro, /home/user is writeable like usual, so any attacker is able to persist itself by editing
~/.bashrcand putting a binary somewhere.