After reading https://askubuntu.com/questions/1416758/remote-full-system-b... I’ve been debating whether to try this out on some of my live headless pi’s that I manage remotely, but have been worried to try it without a test system first.
Seems like booting into PiCore could be perfect for this scenario. You could even use some of the A/B try-boot functionality that rpi have introduced into the bootloader over the past year, and basically have a kind of live recovery os. Would love to know if that could be possible.
Been mulling this over for the past couple weeks and then this HN post about PiCore pops-up literally day I was going over that askubuntu post again! I’m taking it as a sign…..
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.
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.
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,27681.0.html
But I don't see a comparable overview.
