Atomic Linux distributions

• #linux
• #opensource
• #software

Linux distributions that lock down certain parts of the filesystem as read-only, where updates are typically applied in a transactional way that can be safely undone or rolled back.

Fedora's Silverblue and its many offshoots are a popular choice, as is NixOS. The bootcrew GitHub org is working on experimental support for atomic flavors of several commonly used Linux distros. BlueBuild, a tool for building custom atomic Fedora images using a declarative YAML format, is working on alpha support for the bootcrew images.

Many such distributions use container-oriented tool sets so that Docker, Podman, and other container ecosystems can be used to build and ship updates as OCI-compatible images constructed in immutable layers. A common tool set is the combination of bootc, ostree and composefs.