I'm incredibly close to pulling the trigger to make WattOS my new distro for my netbook. I've been using antiX for a while and it's really great overall but the lack of systemd has worn me down I feel. A few programs I want to use just don't work properly without systemd and I don't have the patience to fill in the gaps myself.

My only real concern with WattOS is the fact it seems so mysterious. There's very little info on their site and NO LICENSE OR SOURCE CODE OR REPOSITORY! I highly doubt Russia or China are trying to weasel their way into old AF computers to create a botnet but I've never seen a Linux project be so secretive.

Anyone else have some light to shed on this project?

Couldn't find the project in my browser history or Lemmy saves. I'm pretty sure it was Lemmy though that led me to find a GitHub project similar to OSTree. It sounded like it was maintained by one person and it hasn't been updated in a long time because the author thought it was "done" and they used it frequently.

It was a tool that let them basically create images that could be booted from and it was easy to layer software on top of a base image and I think there were config files similar to Containerfiles but didn't look the same. Don't think it be was "goldboot" either but that might be a little closer to what the project does. I don't think it was something Fedora specific either like bootc.

Update: Found it! It was in the history of a laptop I rarely use (of course). The project is https://github.com/godarch/darch and it does appear to be those things I said: layered, docker-like, bare metal, and OS agnostic.

I just pulled down the latest Firefox Dev Edition AppImage and still getting the same result. I try to login to GitLab and I get an endless loop of checking whether I'm human or not. I tried to turn off tracking protection for GitLab and Cloudflare and added both to accept all cookies. In the network tab it eventually shows 403s. Anyone else have this happen or know if I can disable any more safety/privacy features to get it working?

I've looked at a lot of other immutable distros and I might just end up using one of those, but I feel like taking on a bit of a challenge and there's a few things I'm not very keen on with existing solutions (last paragraph is my idea if you want to skip the context).

Most immutable systems I've seen require a reboot in order to apply system changes. What is this, Windows? Yeah, reboots are quick but restoring my windows and getting back into my groove is not quick. Also, every immutable OS I've seen wants you to opt-in to a rollback. Rarely do I see the full effects of installing a package or altering a config immediately. By the time I notice an issue maybe it's too late to rollback to before the change or maybe I've done a few other things since and I don't want to rollback everything. I would much prefer to make "rolling forward" or persisting changes to be a very conscious process.

I started messing with BTRFS and I think I've come up with a process that will get me what I want, no matter the distro. Please poke holes in my idea. So I think I can use BTRFS to hold data for the rootfs in three different subvolumes (at minimum): root-A, root-B, root-Z. root-Z is my golden image and it represents what I want root to look like after reboot. root-A and root-B are the active and passive instances of rootfs, but which one is active will flip-flop after every reboot. So if I boot with A, B gets replaced with the contents of Z. In the meantime I can do whatever I want with A. Not sure how I'll update Z (chroot or "promote" the active subvol to be Z) but without an update every reboot is an automatic rollback.

Thoughts?

Couple of things for me.

One is tiny croutons. I don't see them anywhere anymore. They taste the same but it's kind of a pain sometimes to keep the big ones on your fork. The small ones were a little more satisfying to snack on too.

Second is Blue Nehi. Never met anyone else that's tried or heard of it. Damn it was good though. Big Blue is kinda similar but those always taste under carbonated.