If only TinyCore’s design sensibilities had garnered more attention over the ostree monstrosity

I say this as someone who likes and use TinyCoreLinux and PiCore, there are some mind numbing ways TCL makes immutability work. I chalk this up to Linux and immutability being sometimes in contention with each other. Lots of Linux code make assumptions paths being writable.

what’s the problem with ostree?

How long have you got?

It's a gratuitously overcomplex implementation of a relatively simple concept which uses opaque complex tooling to fake a filesystem, lying to the user about what's on their disk, in ways that are so baroque only because its primary corporate sponsor does not have a COW-snapshot filesystem in its flagship distro.

There are alternative tools that do all it does in simpler, cleaner, more understandable ways, with better tools that are also smaller and simpler. openSUSE, ChromeOS, Nix, Guix, and indeed, TinyCore all achieve the same goal with tooling that is about 1% of the size or complexity.

Unix is about being small and simple and clean. This is its core design principle. Ostree is none of these.

> openSUSE, ChromeOS, Nix, Guix, and indeed, TinyCore all achieve the same goal with tooling that is about 1% of the size or complexity

Those make very specific tradeoffs to do what they do.

OpenSUSE needs a snapshotting filesystem, and uses btrfs. ChromeOS needs doubled up partitions and can only keep 2 versions. I profoundly disagree that nix and guix are simpler than... almost anything, actually. They're great, but they turn the entire world inside out to do it. Not familiar with TinyCore so can't comment.

This shouldn't be read as a strong defense of ostree, mind, just that every single option appears to have significant tradeoffs thus far.

I absolutely agree.

It's all tradeoffs all the way down, like the rest of 21st century computing.

The thing is that there is a widespread mindset of "hey look, this family of distros has been offering immutable distros for quite a while and it has multiple flavours and it's from a well-known vendor, therefore it must be the best and most mature, right?"

(Obviously I caricature but I think it's a valid one.)

RH makes a lot of noise and does a lot of promotion and FOSS folks are even worse than the general audience at distinguishing hype from fact, because (1) they're not used to being marketed at and (b) much of the entire Unix world runs on familial loyalty and tribalism and it has done since the 1970s. Compare Vi vs Emacs, or C vs C++, or RPM vs DEB, or GNOME vs KDE, and a thousand other examples.

I worked for both RH and SUSE. I've directly personally seen the company mindsets from the inside. RH is akin to a religion and has a profound entrenched culture of disdain for all other vendors' offerings. I've rarely seen anything else quite like it except for the more rabid of Apple (and to a degree Microsoft) fanboys. It is, incidentally, a characteristic of the company culture to deny this to outsiders, but I went through the training and the acculturation.

It's all about compromise. As such it is important to acknowledge that different sets of compromises are possible.

ChromeOS works and for all its perceived flaws, it's out there on hundreds of millions of user-facing PCs. It started to outsell Macs in the USA in 2017 and by the COVID pandemic did so worldwide. By sales value, not unit sales. IOW multiply the differential by at least 5x.

Sure it sounds limited, but limited and extremely robust with massive field-proven resilience is more important than a tiny but loud niche.

Of course, when one says this, the tiny but loud niche will be enraged.

Tough.

Linux maybe, not so true of all the DEs and apps installed on it

Because the attestations will only work on iOS and Google Play integrity attested devices. Meaning Apple and Google accounts required.

A phone is also required then?

This is an assumption, but not confirmed.

I spent months designing a system, exactly like this. An account is not needed, at least for Apple.

Play Integrity could the worst offender here, as it can be leveraged to force a user to have installed the app through the Play Store. Indirectly, requiring a Google account.

> I suspect that there's an unstated additional qualification: that your account hasn't previously received an extra usage credit.

I received extra usage credit in February, and I got the email today asking me to claim this extra credit. Managed to claim this one too.

But the supermarkets will do it too

The prices are literally marked on the shelves.

Today, yes. I can imagine a future where that sticker is replaced with an electronic display, and facial rec shows you an individualized price.

You don't think customers are going to figure that out by talking to each other and comparing prices on the spot?

Do you ever talk to other humans IRL?

> Coincidently, in the original timeline of Transformer movie, 2029 is the year that the Resistance, led by John Connor, destroyed Skynet and ended the war against the machines.

I’d love to see that crossover Terminator and Transformers movie. Optimus Prime vs T-800 anyone?

I seem to recall that the entire chip that was created by buddy, to enable skynet, was actually a chip in a Terminator that was reverse engineered.

Leaving the original timeline uncertain.

Was it original, really the original? Or the 10th, or millionth loop?

Skynet can still be in our future.

So which path is in Mr. Karp's future? Oh wait he's an exempt one right? (says me before reading the article and finding out about his dyslexia...)

> Or just not have it at all? What is wrong with parental controls AND parenting?

It doesn't hand over control of computing to governments

> on a iPhone 19 pro

I wish the website could tell us how life is like in 2027!

Itd be nice if our computer programs were more deterministic, that's what we use computers for. Not to repeat failure modes of humans.