The author's point is to use an immutable or atomic system. Debian uses a traditional package manager and over time those packages can get in a weird state. Battery runs out during package update? Third party repo disappears? GPG key changes? Distribution eliminates 32-bit library support? Nvidia drivers change? Distribution deprecates Xorg? Your everyday user doesn't know how to deal with that.
An A/B partition scheme is very simple and the system as a whole is integration tested in CI. An OSTree based atomic system is pretty close, although there is some added complexity.
Not to mention Debian out-of-the-box is a pretty miserable experience for everyday users. Their Nvidia drivers won't work, they can't figure out how to install Chrome, videos won't play due to missing codecs, etc.
> An OSTree based atomic system is pretty close, although there is some added complexity.
The author mentions this as well but there's no details there. We've been shipping chromeos-style images with universal blue for over 4 years and the ostree parts are invisible to end users. What do you feel takes away from the user experience?
Thanks for your work by the way, I'm a happy uBlue (Bazzite) user.
I think my main concern is something like a known OSTree design issue around UID/GID drift, there was a bug that was partly fixed in 2023 but the issue comes from OSTree assigning known UIDs from the deployment once created, but this may not map to the proper UID on the system the deployment is being blasted to. You can get improper ownership out of this.
Not something I've ever encountered myself, but if I were developing an embedded device it seems like one less thing to worry about.
I have 0 problems installing Debian. Half the features listed in the article and yoyr reply aren’t even used by the average user. I don’t know how you can sit there and claim Debian doesn’t work but Ubuntu does. Please share what you’re smoking..
An A/B partition scheme is very simple and the system as a whole is integration tested in CI. An OSTree based atomic system is pretty close, although there is some added complexity.
Not to mention Debian out-of-the-box is a pretty miserable experience for everyday users. Their Nvidia drivers won't work, they can't figure out how to install Chrome, videos won't play due to missing codecs, etc.