“Immutable” → reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis

Colin Walters

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…

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!

The Read Only Scenario

An excellent introduction to these kinds of desktops

openSUSE MicroOS

Richard Brown

Can MicroOS Desktop be your Daily Driver?

Dario Faggioli

MicroOS Desktop: The Road to Daily Driving

Richard Brown

19 talks on Fedora Silverblue and related technologies

many recorded talks here, too many to list here, but worth it!

ostree CLI for OS management

Denis Pynkin

Let's try Fedora Silverblue

Adam Šamalik

How Nix and NixOS Get So Close to Perfect

Xe

Fedora Silverblue: is this the FUTURE of Linux? - Project of the Month

older video but an excellent review of the major components

Learning the difference between Red Hat distributions and what Fedora Silverblue is

JJ Asghar

Linux After Dark – Episode 07

the hosts tried silverblue and did an episode on their experiences.

Fedora Silverblue: An Immutable OS

Fedora 36 Silverblue: The 3 Guiding Principles for a Successful Experience

excellent introduction video that covers lots of tips and tricks.

How we build and maintain Kairos

Mauro Morales, FOSDEM 2023

Meet Kairos, an OSS project building the immutable Kubernetes edge

Ettore Di Giacinto and Nic Vermande

Fedora Atomic

The official atomic editons of Fedora; Spins; Related Projects; 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; Useful Documentation

Fedora Kinoite

An atomic-based Fedora based on KDE Plasma desktop enviroment

Fedora Silverblue

An atomic-based Fedora based on the GNOME desktop environment

Fedora COSMIC Atomic

An atomic-based Fedora based on System76's COSMIC desktop environment

Fedora Sway Atomic

An atomic-based Fedora based on the Sway tiling window manager

Fedora Budgie Atomic

An atomic-based Fedora based on Budgie desktop environment

Fedora CoreOS

An atomic-based Fedora focused on servers

Universal Blue

An organization dedicated to build and distribute cloud-native OSTree OCI images originally based on Fedora Atomic. list of source images, list of end-user images

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

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, COSMIC, and Niri desktop environments, using the P03 kernel by default, the Rum package manager, and replacing legacy shell utilities with modern alternatives (i.e. eza, bat, sudo-rs, …)

Ostree Native Container

Spec on Silverblue moving to a native OCI container model (Huge change)

Development on Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite

Setting yourself up for success before trying Fedora Silverblue

Day-to-day differences between Fedora Silverblue and Ubuntu

openSUSE Kalpa

An atomic variant of openSUSE with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, featuring containers with Distrobox.

openSUSE Aeon

An atomic variant of openSUSE with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring containers with Distrobox.

openSUSE MicroOS

An atomic variant of openSUSE for servers

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

Nitrux

A Debian-based Linux distribution that features NX Desktop and the MauiKit Applications suite.

blendOS

blendOS is an operating system that seamlessly blends all your Linux distributions into one.

Kairos

The immutable Linux meta-distribution for edge Kubernetes.

ChimeraOS

A Steam Big Picture based couch gaming OS utilizing frzr

Arkane Linux

Arch based immutable distro which uses Arkdep

NixOS

a Linux distribution based on Nix package manager

DevEnv

DevBox

Flox

Guix System

a Linux distribution based on the Guix package manager

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.

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.

libostree (a.k.a. OSTree)

Operating system and container binary deployment and upgrades

Upcoming experimental features in rpm-ostree

flatpak-ostree-dedup-stats.py

script to show you how well the ostree deduplication is working, this one is neat

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.

Image Builder - osbuild

Build Infrastructure for Operating Systems

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.

Integrate VSCode and Distrobox

silverblue-nix

Andrew Hayzen's steps for getting nix working on Fedora Silverblue.

Toolbox Visual Studio Code Integration

Toolbox Visual Studio Code integration

workstation-ostree-config

Manifests for rpm-ostree based Fedora variants (start here!)

ostree-pitti-workstation

Fedora minimal sway developer desktop

vauxite

This is an rpm-ostree-based Fedora Xfce desktop.

zepyros-dev's config

JayDoubleau's config (ansiblue)

Universal BLue

Community built OS images based on Fedora Silverblue

ansible-silverblue

Jim Campbell's ansible playbook for silverblue

Sodalite: A Pantheon Experience for Silverblue

silvernobara

Fedora Silverblue with Project Nobara enhancements