The State of Immutable Linux

Glad to see Talos Linux there!

Another interesting, though less radical take on an immutable container OS is IncusOS. Made by the same people behind LXC: https://github.com/lxc/incus-os

I wish the article's NixOS section had mentioned impermanence features which can be used to make NixOS actually immutable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence

> It’s 2026, if you’re not using something immutable (or at least reproducable) you’re doing more maintenance work than you should.

I used to use MicroOS on Raspberry Pis and NUCs but the rolling release actually led to more maintenance work (fixing breaking changes like config changes). Eventually I moved to Ubuntu but kept the mindset that all installed applications should be podman containers. I don't miss MicroOS...

I went all in about a year ago after running microOs for some time. I am pretty happy with the situation, and while I do like the transactional-update way of microos, their immutable desktops have been too much work for me. Kalpa is alpha, and aeon runs gnome. I tried for a year, but one day I had enough and installed kinoite and haven't looked back (although I have been looking at Aurora).

Since you never touch the base system, you get more or less a rolling release distro, since updating between fedora versions becomes even simpler.