The Ruthless Elimination of Differences

I am excited for image-based Linux.  Yes, I usually complain about people upending things just when they get stable, but I think there’s a real benefit here: the elimination of differences.

Why, exactly, does installing Ubuntu have to unpack a bunch of .deb files inside a system? Thousands or millions of machines will go consume CPU to run maintainer scripts, to hopefully produce identical output, when most of the desired result should have been possible to save as an image in the first place.  Upstream should know what’s in ubuntu-minimal!  Looking through a different lens, Gentoo distributes a stage2 image.

In theory, an installation CD could carry the minimal image, the installer overlay, and the flavor’s overlay.  The installer’s boot loader would bring up the kernel, use the minimal+installer pair as root file system, and the installer would unpack the minimal+flavor images into the new disk partition.

“Image-based Linux” more or less takes this one more step, running the entire system directly from the images (or a singular combined image.)  Everyone gets to use the same pre-made images, and bugs become less dependent on the history of package operations.

If any of this sounds like Puppy Linux, that’s not entirely accidental.

This is also the space where things like ABRoot are being introduced.  Image-based Linux lends itself well to having an integrated rollback/recovery pathway. Even on my non-image systems, having “a recovery partition” has been more valuable than I ever anticipated.  It let me test backups without having to work very hard about simulating a disaster. I also created my own recovery partition when I was still using a RealTek USB WiFi device, to avoid being stranded without internet.  (Word to the wise: use Mediatek instead, or an Intel PCIe card is a good non-USB option.)

Image-based Linux and the tools around it are poised to make real improvements to the repeatability and reliability of the systems.  I don’t know when I, personally, might benefit (as my daily driver is macOS now), but I am very excited about the progress being made here.