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I know SteamOS uses an immutable file system over a custom Arch install. Have any people here tried this kind of thing with immutable file systems on Arch and

• m463 2y ago
  Arch is pretty much the opposite of immutable. An immutable filesystem sort of implies a specific collection of packages chosen by someone else and combined in a monolithic release. Everyone gets the same OS, and overlays their data on top of it. Arch contains the specific packages you have chosen, and they are all updated asynchronously using a rolling release system. Not that you couldn't have a read-only os partition and a user overlay partition. With pacman it wouldn't really match the philosophy of immmutable.
  • throwaway314155 2y ago
    Have you used SteamOS? I don't know the particulars but I'm pretty sure they do indeed make all the important bits read-only. You can temporarily use pacman as root, but it isn't supported so any changes made are overwritten when an upgrade happens or a system crash causes a the partition to be verified. Again, very much out of my depth here so sorry if i'm misusing terms etc.
    • m463 2y ago
      I tried playing with it long ago (like 1.0 era) but it was too specific. From what I can tell, it seems that 3.x os updates are distributed as an entire os image? It is based on arch, but you don't update individual packages with pacman. Basically everyone gets the same unchanging os, with individual games and data separately.
• hughesjj 2y ago
  Usually better to just install on btrfs and use rollbacks/snapshots