ABRoot Reinvents The Immutable Linux Distro

Рет қаралды 8,567

Жыл бұрын

Most immutable linux distros make use of Libostree but it's not the only tool out there, today we're looking at ABroot the tool used to make VanillaOS immutable ever since dropping Almost
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Пікірлер: 115

@TheEvilSkelly Жыл бұрын

A little correction, most distros do not use OSTree. Silverblue is just the most popular one out there, but Kinoite is essentially a flavor of it. openSUSE MicroOS uses btrfs directly and NixOS do their own thing. Those are a few examples I can think of.

@nyxalexandra-io Жыл бұрын

NixOS is odd in that regard. I think that just `/etc` is mutable

@zivvyyy Жыл бұрын

@@nyxalexandra-io only /nix is immutable

@BrodieRobertson Жыл бұрын

That's fair, I should have phrased it as when you think of an immutable distro it's using ostree. The term only started floating around when silverblue hit the scene

@muqtxdir Жыл бұрын

carbon os, gnome os and endless also uses ostree to some degree, so it kinda is most distros

@speedytruck Жыл бұрын

@@muqtxdir Indeed, it's because ostree is far superior to the ancient two partitions system.

@Camper_Samu Жыл бұрын

ABRoot is what modern Android uses to manage system updates actually! Even cooler, if you have an A/B compatible device (99.9% post-2017 android devices) and you try hard enough, you can create a C (common) partition and dualboot your Android phone, there's a cool project for the OnePlus 7/Pro/T that does it and I use it, it's very handy since this gives me the ability of testing a distro or an update in a live environment before updating my main partition (basically it removes the automatic part of A/B to hand it back to the user)

@Lutitious Жыл бұрын

This is actually how most android phones work nowadays, its pretty nice and helped me out a couple of times when messing up flashing a new os

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

Yeah, ABRoot is what convinced me that VanillaOS will be the distro for me. It was really annoying to work with immutable distro before, you have to really understand or get really in-depth. With ABRoot, most of the same commands and tweaks you usually do can be done in abroot shell, but there's more safeguard in case of issues. THAT is what Windows Updates should have been. Windows Updates made me left Windows 10, the glibc and grub issue made me not want to deal with Arch anymore, and a solution for update is what convince me to keep an eye on Vanilla OS. Now I'm just waiting for the KDE edition to switch to it. It is kind of funny to imagine how I'd probably never left Windows if they have this system though. Would have been better than the stupid WINDOWS.OLD backup method they had too. On the note of what also needed to be installed on root, from what I saw Docker still need to be done via abroot shell, getting zsh by default for host and container is sorta easier if you have zsh in host, and I'm pretty sure there are networking stuff that you'd want to do on root (like installing GUI VPN and firewall). But yeah, not that much, with Apx, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, Conty, and Junest being a thing.

@Beryesa. Жыл бұрын

Mixed immutability: still flexible, newbie-proof, stable... Why not?

@Blueeeeeee Жыл бұрын

It would be super nice if you could do a tour of these new distro-agnostic software installation methods. Between Flatpak & Co, NixOS, and now Distrobox, there's a lot of choices and it would be nice to do a comparison of these technologies, and where they're best used 🙂

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

AFAIK: Flatpak: good for GUI Apps, and if you want some built-in sandboxing that you can customize, has good support for Wayland Snap: good for CLI and headless stuff, can do GUI apps but it still has lots of issues, sandboxing situation is complicated AppImage: good if you want a single-file portable binary, and if you don't want any sandboxing -- mounts itself on a random folder in /tmp so that might have some issues, doesn't work with Wayland yet NixOS: about as close as you get to AUR for every distro, still relies on root access, is still fairly complicated compared to the above three that has decent GUI tools and easier setup Distrobox: basically a minimal install of a distro, via docker, with most of the permissions set-up OOTB for GUI and CLI use. Still has some issues with certain integrations, privilege access, and it's much less mature than the above Junest: basically arch distrobox but without docker/podman, though still have issues with certain integrations and root operations -- has much smaller community than distrobox too Conty: it's one giant collection of binaries, so it can be big and heavy, and if you want custom packages installed then you have to build it yourself These are the ones that I have dipped my toes into, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any point.

@Blueeeeeee Жыл бұрын

@@FengLengshun My basic understanding of Flatpaks is that the runtimes are used as a basis to run applications in a pseudo-container of some kind, is that correct ? In that case, could we say that Flatpak is just a miniature and more user-friendly version of Distrobox, with the caveat that applications need to be packaged for it rather than taken from an existing source ?

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

@@Blueeeeeee I mean, if you squint enough, then all container framework start to look the same. You can think that if you want to, but IMO it would ignore the finer points that sets Flatpak apart compared to the rest of the list.

@o.aggelos Жыл бұрын

@@Blueeeeeee A runtime is just what set of libraries will your application use. Imagine it like a framework.

@ChimeraX0401 Жыл бұрын

So it is like what android is doing for a long time. Android does have this kind of root partition system, it is used mainly to prevent android phones from bricking itself when an update fails or interrupted midway though it also makes installing custom rom a PITA. In the past I'm thinking when will linux take advantage of this kind of root partition but I guess finally someone think of this as a good idea....

@ChaoticMagnet Жыл бұрын

That is precisely what Android has been doing since always. Good to see a linux desktop os finally adopt this update model!

@ChaoticMagnet Жыл бұрын

@gius dbThis could also be solved using overlayfs to never really need to actually modify any of the roots if you're not updating them.

@colbyboucher6391 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for this, this is something that 100% needed to be part of the discussion.

@Blueeeeeee Жыл бұрын

This is really interesting. It also means no need for "systemd offline updates" on startup.

@xorgX11 Жыл бұрын

4:45 Why I was getting Endgame vibes when you were explaining this :) . Also one question where the Flatpaks are going to be installed. I mean if I don't have a separate home partition is it going to be on AB root or somewhere else.

@generallyunimportant Жыл бұрын

i love the whiteboard in this one.

@dreamcat4 Жыл бұрын

certainly interesting and a great project. i just am hoping to have something with similar functionality based on more flexible btrfs or zfs snapshots. that can then be rolled back etc. so i am wondering now since we can already do that on other setups (before abroot came along) if the functionality provided by ab root does or does not indeed offer anything worthwhile above that. which a snapshots based system did not already offer?

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

I think that's what astOS does - it's arch based immutable distro which uses btrfs-snapshot as overlay or something like that. I haven't really looked into it, but it looks interesting? Regarding what abroot offers: based from what I understand, it should prevent the grub breakage that happened on Arch last year? Also, I have broken my install while messing around with single gpu passthrough. Theoretically, in both cases the transaction couldn't be completed since it wouldn't boot, and thus it should be reverted and I would still have a working system without reinstalling or booting to another ISO to fix it in chroot.

@commentarysheep Жыл бұрын

Seems like Linux is catching up with Google's A/B system partition implementation used on newer Android phones to do seamless system updates, but used for noobie distros where the devs don't want users randomly breaking elements of the root partition. But honestly, I'm just gonna stay with the likes of Arch, Gentoo and Void as I personally like goofing around with my expert distros.

@Rcomian Жыл бұрын

I'm sitting here wondering if abroot can be used on gentoo ...

@commentarysheep Жыл бұрын

@@Rcomian You can already create an immutable Gentoo installation with dm0's immutable Linux distro installation scripts. Just type in "immutable gentoo" into your search engine and the GitHub repo will show up.

@dntbther9298 Жыл бұрын

Just waiting for a commercially viable(affordable for third world countries :') ) Linux phone that doesn't use 2008 graphics card and CPU. Pinephone felt like a scam... And certainly I don't care if it doesn't have hardware Killswitch. I have enough brain power to not click accept on every pop-up i see on the web. Also as much as i despise iphones, having only one type of hardware every 2-3 years and optimizing the Os around it is a good strategy.

@guss77 Жыл бұрын

I hate that the move is to reboot your machine more - I hate offline updates: I want to apply the OS updates, and continue with my life - why do I need to shutdown all my work to get system updates? It didn't use to be that way on Linux. And before anyone asks - I don't want to reboot at night or even automatically: I have a complex work setup that takes >10 minutes to start and I normally don't reboot for weeks at a time. If there's no important kernel update or a display server update, there's no reason to reboot.

@playdead9779 Жыл бұрын

If I'm understanding this correct sounds like it would be great on arch for updates.

@the1trancedemon Жыл бұрын

else timeshift is a great utility for any distro if you find yourself doing critical changes and tinkering with the system often. ideal for the ordinary distros that can get messed up.

@OcteractSG Жыл бұрын

Yeah, keep abroot for hardware stuff, like drivers, drives, and other hardware-related stuff (e.g., correcting screen backlight issues). DistroBox has you covered for regular packages.

@danielkrajnik3817 Жыл бұрын

what's with the abstract art on the whiteboard

@VictorMatheus1234 Жыл бұрын

Im using this on btrfs. "infinity" root version, single partition. Pac-base create new root, and run operation, if sucess, set to next boot, if failed, destroy. Simple shell script over grub, pacman and btrfs, in Vanilla (😉) ArchLinux Configs mounted on boot using overlayfs fs, edit /etc noot need reboot. Ghub vmath3us stateless-arch

@idcrafter-cgi Жыл бұрын

this ABRoot seems like Androids A/B partitioning but different

@speedytruck Жыл бұрын

So basically rpm-ostree, but you only get two images, and it takes much more space... think I'm going to stay with silverblue for now

@Anthropomorphic Жыл бұрын

Speaking of which, does anyone know how VanillaOS is holding up? Back when it first launched, I heard some talk about it being unstable or not installing properly for a lot of people.

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

There are still issues with certain hardware. I'm at the Discord and... every 3 days or so, I think? There's new reports of which hardwares it doesn't run. I get the impression many of them are rather old systems, though. For now, there's still a lot of work to be done, I'm testing it on a VM, I'm waiting for KDE edition to install it, which hopefully should include manual partitioning in the installer and support for dual-boot by then.

@AshtonSnapp Жыл бұрын

Not sure about the aspect of the two roots automatically being synced (if I’m getting that aspect correctly) - what if an update breaks something? You have nothing to go back to.

@muammar007 Жыл бұрын

It will only sync when the update gets successfully applied and you can boot from it

@donaldmickunas8552 Жыл бұрын

@@muammar007 The question for me is, What constitutes a successful update? If a successful update occurs with the completion of the various update functions such as file updates without a test of resultant functionality, then the system will be broken as a result. So if rsync fails, then that sync will not be implemented. If rsync completes successfully, then it will be implemented regardless of resulting operational consequences.

@xperience-evolution Жыл бұрын

And now blendOS comes around the corner and does the same in a different way and based in Arch. Can you take a look at it? Crazy and exciting times for Linux Desktop

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

BlendOS uses a 'nearly', an immutable system based on VanillaOS' older system of 'almost', which to oversimplify things just applies 'sudo chattr -i' to the files. As such, I don't feel like it adds a lot of value that astOS and SteamOS doesn't already cover in that niche. It would be more interesting if it uses abroot - making sure you can boot and don't need to chroot would be a much more massive value-added boost to an Arch-based system IMHO.

@xperience-evolution Жыл бұрын

@@FengLengshun There will be many changes for the next update (One I think is getting rid of Distrobox) And many things are made from scratch. It has some advantages over Vanilla OS and I don't think almost is used (it was planed to use it but it did not make it into the release

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

@@xperience-evolution according to rudra in the vanilla-os discord (due to the crediting issues), 'nearly' did started out as a fork of 'almost' but it was rewritten enough to be distinctly its own thing. Still, it's the same basic idea, and IMHO it's really not good enough given how unreliable Arch has been last year. As for distrobox, isn't 'blend' based on distrobox much like 'apx' is? Though it has that install DE option shortcut, which IS doable on distrobox but according to luca in vanilla-os discord, it is NOT recommended as anything more than an experiment, yet.

@LabiaLicker Жыл бұрын

Why not a Copy on write file system instead?

@exotericidymnic3530 Ай бұрын

does this mean we can finally rm -rf root without any worries

@gbj1viciado Жыл бұрын

Can't wait to see a arch based distro using ABroot.

@Sorvetedchocolat Жыл бұрын

Steam Deck's OS?

@shijikori Жыл бұрын

I wonder what would ABroot + overlayFS would look like.

@accountid9681 Жыл бұрын

Isn't this the exact same system android uses?

@BrodieRobertson Жыл бұрын

I was unaware of the android system but if that's the case then it's likely highly inspired by it

@Looser_23 Жыл бұрын

@@BrodieRobertson some Android phones around 2018 had A/B partitioning scheme. They would install your Android update on the unused slot and you can update while the phone is running and only have to reboot after to switch slots. You could also roll back an update that way. I know this because my OnePlus 6 has such a partition scheme and I had PostmarketOS and LineageOS "dual booted" on it once, one on each slot. Unfortunately that made it so I could only use 8GB of my device's storage, which were already occupied by 2 operating systems. So I had to choose between Android and Linux. And well? I might not have a working camera now and my phone's internals can get to 50°C while watching 1080p videos, but at least I can run neofetch and cmatrix to brag in front of friends and ssh from my phone like a boss.

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

It's a lot like it, but correct me if I'm wrong, aren't android updates based on image files? So in Android it's more like a combination of Steam Deck and the abroot update systems. I think the main difference is that it's not image based, so you can DIY your own "updates" and it won't get overwritten by a future update unless you chose to. But by the naming, Android A/B partition had to be an inspiration and is what I also thought first too.

@tabletaccountforyoutube Жыл бұрын

I'm not really sure I understand the benefits of an immutable system still. I've heard a lot of discussion about "more stability" and such but I don't see what the difference would be between say, updating packages normally on Ubuntu or updating an immutable Ubuntu installation which will be made out of those exact same packages. While I DO on the other hand understand that some people mess with their system which could cause stability problems, you don't really need to run a special immutable distro for that. You can just.. not mess with your system. If I'm wrong about this I'd love for someone to correct me on the benefits of an immutable system. For example, what would be the point of me running Fedora Silverblue if I could just run regular Fedora and only install flatpaks. Wouldn't that be nearly the same thing?

@florianfelix8295 Жыл бұрын

It’s mostly a benefit for distributions.

@kbdk Жыл бұрын

No the packages are same the implementation isn't, let's say you install something in Vanilla and the package is same as in Ubuntu and it breaks something within a transaction it isn't applied at all upon reboot and is dropped as ABRoot is atomic in nature. Atomicity is a very unique thing to immutable distributions specifically Vanilla and it's a very common topic in DBMS. If something conflicts or breaks which is highly likely in a mutable system you are left in an unusable environment whereas with atomicity those changes which break the underlying file system aren't applied at all.

@tillend8310 Жыл бұрын

So, it's like ab partition in Android.

@drsensor Жыл бұрын

Looks like something that play nice with nixpkgs

@thingsiplay Жыл бұрын

I would go so far and suggest an ABCDE root, so I can easily go back in time. Would it make sense? Because traditional backup tools like Timeshift would not work correctly with this, or would it?

@user-db4dd4ze3n Жыл бұрын

Ever heard of our lord and savior NixOS?

@thingsiplay Жыл бұрын

@@user-db4dd4ze3n NixOS does not use ABRoot, or does it?

@dreamcat4 Жыл бұрын

as far as brodie mentioned in his video, it seems like the main benefit for using this ab root instead of timeshift is you gain the ability to quietly install updates in the background. without interrupting the user until it is time to reboot the machine i cannot think of any other benefits myself. so if anybody else here can explain other reasons for why it's any better than snapshots

@user-db4dd4ze3n Жыл бұрын

@@thingsiplay It does not, but it makes easier to go back in time.

@thingsiplay Жыл бұрын

@@dreamcat4 ABRoot isn't meant to be a replacement for timeshift. Its more like the Dual BIOS I have on my motherboard, where there is a current Active one and another Previous one, after an update and successfull boot. My question is, when I use timeshift to create backup history of my system, how does it play with going back in time with ABRoot. Because something can install successfully, but it might be a bug or performance problem that needs to be addressed and I need to go back. There are so many questions open to be tested with this new way of system.

@joshualeivenzon9613 Жыл бұрын

NixOS solves this problem in a much nicer way, with symlinks. Changes are also atomic, but don't require a reboot, and you can keep as many copies of previous states as you want with very little disk usage.

@kibels894 Жыл бұрын

What if the sync fails?

@BrodieRobertson Жыл бұрын

Then nothing happens and you boot into an unsynced root

@milohoffman274 Жыл бұрын

ABRoot is very much like how things like Linux based routers and embedded devices achieved something similar to immutability since the 90s, it's not a new technique. But it is a bit of a hack, and we have newer solutions now like ostree for a reason.

@mskiptr Жыл бұрын

Well, I just checked and my OS install takes 8.1GiB. I guess with a whole DE it would definitely be bigger, but still… Drivers really don't take much space. (this is after more then a year of daily using this machine)

@JorgetePanete Жыл бұрын

than*

@mskiptr Жыл бұрын

@@JorgetePanete Indeed

@Mempler Жыл бұрын

Wouldn't this kill an SSD? As it writes the same thing twice

@clocked0 Жыл бұрын

ABRoot is how ChromeOS applies updates.

@michaelmcdonald3275 Жыл бұрын

openSUSE are working on immutable Micro OS

@kbdk Жыл бұрын

It isn't intended for desktop and more inclined towards IoT from what I remember

@vilijanac Жыл бұрын

I didn't know you can immutable be rooted.

@Ghfvhvfg Жыл бұрын

Sounds alot like the fastboot system of android phones so you could say its like android/ChromeOs

@denizkendirci Жыл бұрын

i hope that the growth in immutable distro market share is an additional growth and isn't stolen from the market share of non-immutable distros. because as a guy who runs linux for personal use only, i found this immutably thing really cumbersome, and i don't want it to become the future of linux in general.

@happygofishing Жыл бұрын

all of this seems over engineered and will further obfuscate how technology works and make it harder for users to modify things.

@BrodieRobertson Жыл бұрын

Luckily you don't have to use it if you feel that way, all of this stuff going on is people testing different ideas, if they're bad they won't stick around

@cloudpuncher4615 Жыл бұрын

Only an Aussie gets your thumbnail.....

@seanfaherty Жыл бұрын

Is it just me that does not like immutable distros ? Just on principle I like to be able to break shit that I own

@BrodieRobertson Жыл бұрын

Lucky there's plenty of other distros for that

@seanfaherty Жыл бұрын

@@BrodieRobertson and ways around the immutability

@Amos_Huclkeberry Жыл бұрын

If universal package formats are the future, a lot of printers aren't going to work.

@BrodieRobertson Жыл бұрын

I'm not sure what you mean

@Amos_Huclkeberry Жыл бұрын

@@BrodieRobertson My printer driver has .deb and .rpm. There is no snap or flatpak for my printer.

@excidium_ Жыл бұрын

@@Amos_Huclkeberry universal packaging isn't for system stuff like drivers. It mostly makes sense for GUI programs that have a lot of dependencies

@Amos_Huclkeberry Жыл бұрын

@@excidium_ Then it can't be the future of Linux. Not by default anyway.

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

It's meant cover up packages where dependencies on various distro are the issues, and it is the future for _software distribution_ on Linux as developers can use Flatpak, snap, and AppImage to target all distributions. It isn't the "future" where your system is made entirely of it. Which is why there is also apx based on distrobox and abroot shell to enter your host root. You can install .deb and .rpm that way, when you absolutely need to, and then use the containerized platforms to do everything else you don't need to.

@h.s3187 Жыл бұрын

Skib d di

@joshua_lee732 Жыл бұрын

I'm still convinced that MicroOS is immutable done right.

@eyssewieringa2084 Жыл бұрын

I don't get the hype. This sounds like windows to me. Wasn't the great thing about linux to have to freedom to break your system?

@FengLengshun Жыл бұрын

If this was on Windows, I literally wouldn't be here talking about Linux right now. I left Windows because of the awful Windows Updates breaking things. Also, no, one of the great things is that it allows you to change everything - the break things is just an extreme example people often use to illustrate that freedom - abroot doesn't change that. I've managed to install KDE and use themed SDDM on it, someone else has managed to install docker on it, and another person even managed to set up a gpu passthrough on it. You still have as much freedom as you do on other distro, it just that there's less likelihood of needing to grab a USB to do chroot or reinstall to fix things.

@o.aggelos Жыл бұрын

Linux is slowly turning into Android and that's just about the worst thing for something as great as Linux.

@darukutsu Жыл бұрын

Just some distros noone cares... Still can use LFS, customizables distros like arch or move to BSDs. Till kernel isn't bloated with java or python then it isn't worth it.

@ikuyoooooo Жыл бұрын

nobody force you to use this type of distro you can still using advanced distro like arch,gentoo,void,etc

@o.aggelos Жыл бұрын

@@ikuyoooooo nobody forces me to do anything, and that doesn't mean I can't say what's wrong with this.

@ikuyoooooo Жыл бұрын

@@o.aggelos so why immutable distro make linux bad when you still have choice using mutable distro? You still have freedom with immutable distro too, i can still install package inside host system with rpm-ostree, i can still edit /etc file, etc

@o.aggelos Жыл бұрын

@@ikuyoooooo for the same reason android is bad and lags on low hardware