Immutable Operating Systems: A Survey - Sebastian Böhm and Guido Wirtz, University of Bamberg, Germany - A short scientific publication that conceptualizes, defines, and outlines use cases and limitations of Immutable Operating Systems.
Why Order Matters: Turing Equivalence in Automated Systems Administration - My personal all-time favorite tech whitepaper about operating systems.
You could take imperative configurations tools (Containerfiles/Dockerfiles, Ansible, …) as example for convergent system configuration tools, while declarative configurations tools (Nix, Guix) would be examples of Convergent system configuration tools
Talks and Videos
The Fedora Podcast - Episode 30 - Jorge Castro and Timothee Ravier talk about Silverblue and the future of Immutable Desktops.
Linux Downtime - Episode 39 - Jorge Castro went on this podcast to talk about this list, image based desktops, flatpaks, and all that stuff. If you are lost start here!
Bazzite - A Universal Blue (Fedora Atomic -based) OCI image focused on Gaming (desktop and handheld); the gold standard for Linux Gaming
Aurora - An Universal Blue OCI image focused on general and development use, based on Fedora Kinoite
Bluefin - An Universal Blue OCI image focused on general and development use, based on Fedora Silverblue
uCore - An Universal Blue OCI image focused on server use, based on Fedora CoreOS
Community & Downstream OCI Projects - These projects are built using Universal Blue infrastructure or base images and utilize BlueBuild to provide specialized versions of the uBlue stack
WayBlue - A community-driven collection of images providing lean, minimally-opinionated Wayland compositors (Hyprland, Sway, River, Niri, …) built on the uBlue framework
SecureBlue - A security-hardened project that adds kernel hardening, a hardened memory allocator (from GrapheneOS), and reduced attack surfaces to the Fedora Atomic/uBlue base
RakuOS Linux - A performance, gaming, and cutting-edge oriented Hybrid Atomic RPM-based bootable image featuring the KDE, GNOME, and COSMIC desktop environments, using the CachyOS kernel, working with dnf/dnf5 instead of rpm-ostree, and replacing legacy shell utilities with modern alternatives (i.e. eza, bat, sudo-rs, …)
Useful Documentation
Ostree Native Container - Spec on Silverblue moving to a native OCI container model (Huge change)
SteamOS - The official Arch-based atomic linux distribution by Valve
NixOS - a Linux distribution based on Nix package manager
awesome-nix - An awesome curated knowledge-base about Nix
SnowflakeOS - A NixOS based Linux distribution focused on beginner friendliness and ease of use.
Guix System - a Linux distribution based on the Guix package manager
RDE - Developer and power user friendly GNU/Linux distribution based on GNU Guix functional package manager
EndlessOS - A Debian derivative distribution with a read-only root filesystem managed by OSTree, and is Flatpak-only for application delivery and update. One of the easiest (but constraining) linux distribution
ChromiumOS - Good design document on how Chromium implements its autoupdate mechanism
ChromeOS (Flex) - the cloud-first, fast, easy-to-manage, and secure operating system by Google. flex is the non-chromebook version
VanillaOS - Vanilla OS is a Debian Sid Linux-based Point Release distribution that receives updates at the right time without sacrificing security and functionality.
KDE Linux - The official arch-based image-based atomic distribution of the KDE project, only shipping KDE Plasma and flatpaks without any other package manager; Currently in Alpha
GNOME OS - The official bleeding-edge development and testing distribution (not recommended for daily usage) of the GNOME project, only shipping GNOME and flatpaks without any other package manager
There historically have been a few versions of "toolbox", and we're probably at a point where it's more of a class of software than an individual project.
Jorge Castro classify toolboxes as "A terminal front end to container runtimes focusing on transparent ease of use of container images".
Someone smarter please make a better definition.
Toolbx - Tool for containerized command line environments on Linux
Toolbx Tuner - Toolbx Tuner is a tool to improve the experience with toolbx.
Toolbx Images - Community maintained container images to use with toolbx (Check these out if you need other distros outside the default Fedora ones)
toolbox-images - a collection of container images for usage with the toolbox command. This is an attempt at providing more feature parity with regard to toolboxes for distributions other than Fedora.
Toolbox GUI - A graphical interface for interacting with Toolbox, written with GTK3 and Python
Distrobox - Tool for containerized command line environments on Linux, distribution agnostic, supports a wide variety of containers , works both with podman and docker - This is a great tool to start with on your existing distro to learn working with day-to-day container workflows.
BoxBuddy - A GUI manager for your Distroboxes, made with GTK4 and Libadwaita.
devbox - Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells and containers.
apx - The default package manager for VanillaOS, utilising Distrobox to manage containers for various distros on the user's behalf.
Core Tools
Things that are the building blocks for all the stuff we're talking about here.
podman - Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System.
gnome-shell-extension-containers - This neat extension lets you see what containers you have, start/stop/restart, pause, and shell into them right from the notification area.
Podman Desktop - Manage different container engines from a single UI and tray icon
Pods - a podman desktop application (formely known as Symfony)
Flatpak - a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.
Lower Level Tools
Most of us will not use these tools directly, but useful for developers:
apt2ostree - apt2ostree is used for building Debian/Ubuntu based ostree images. It performs the same task as debootstrap/multistrap but the output is an ostree tree rather than a rootfs in a directory.
ABRoot - A utility which provides full immutability and atomicity to a Linux system, by transacting between two root filesystems. Updates are performed using OCI images, to ensure that the system is always in a consistent state.
BootC - Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images.
bootupd - Distribution-independent updates for bootloaders.
Elemental Toolkit - A toolkit which allows container images to be bootable in VMs, baremetals, embedded devices, and much more. Elemental and derivatives share a common feature set, can be upgraded with a A/B mechanism, and upgrades are delivered with standard container registries.
GoldBoot - a command-line utility that builds machine images for both servers and workstations alike.
Arkdep - Toolkit for building, deploying and maintaining immutable, atomic, btrfs-based systems
frzr - A deployment and automatic update mechanism for operating systems, utilizing pre-built read-only btrfs subvolumes.
OSTree based systems allow for composable derivative distributions.
If you're automating the config on systems like this please PR your config to share:
