An innovative, immutable filesystem
Totally Relaxed
© Photo by Christine Donaldson on Unsplash
With its immutable filesystem, rlxos prevents a broken system while simultaneously allowing changes via OverlayFS.
When it comes to the Linux distro scene, variety is unrivaled. Willing Linux users can choose from hundreds of distributions. Although this delights die-hard distro hoppers, others might find it too much to handle. While many distributions differ only in the minor details, the strategy behind rlxos [1], an immutable filesystem, is definitely not that of an off-the-shelf Linux distro.
Pronounced Relax OS, rlxos is one of the modern Linux derivatives with a progressive strategy (others include Fedora Silverblue, for example). The developers of Red Hat, Fedora, Endless OS, systemd, and the Gnome desktop see these strategies as the future of distributions, but this has not yet been universally accepted in the various communities.
Unbreakable System
In general, these strategies envisage immunizing the filesystem against vulnerability through updates by always replacing the complete image during updates. In tech speak, these systems are dubbed immutable (i.e., unchangeable). If something goes wrong during the update, the user can roll back to the previous image upon restarting GRUB. In addition, such distributions often prefer new package management systems, such as Flatpak or AppImage, over packages in the classic DEB and RPM formats or those maintained by the respective distributions.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Happy Birthday, ADMIN Magazine!
ADMIN is celebrating its 15th anniversary with issue #90.
-
Another Linux Malware Discovered
Russian hackers use Hyper-V to hide malware within Linux virtual machines.
-
TUXEDO Computers Announces a New InfinityBook
TUXEDO Computers is at it again with a new InfinityBook that will meet your professional and gaming needs.
-
SUSE Dives into the Agentic AI Pool
SUSE becomes the first open source company to adopt agentic AI with SUSE Enterprise Linux 16.
-
Linux Now Runs Most Windows Games
The latest data shows that nearly 90 percent of Windows games can be played on Linux.
-
Fedora 43 Has Finally Landed
The Fedora Linux developers have announced their latest release, Fedora 43.
-
KDE Unleashes Plasma 6.5
The Plasma 6.5 desktop environment is now available with new features, improvements, and the usual bug fixes.
-
Xubuntu Site Possibly Hacked
It appears that the Xubuntu site was hacked and briefly served up a malicious ZIP file from its download page.
-
LMDE 7 Now Available
Linux Mint Debian Edition, version 7, has been officially released and is based on upstream Debian.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Reaches EOL
Linux kernel 6.16 has reached its end of life, which means you'll need to upgrade to the next stable release, Linux kernel 6.17.