Ubuntu Core Desktop is Canonical’s (currently unreleased) immutable and attestable Linux desktop. It represents the most fundamental shift in Ubuntu’s desktop architecture to date, and will mature into the default experience for Ubuntu Desktop over time.
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With this transition comes the promise of greater resilience, better security, more composability, but also more engineering complexity. In this post I’ll outline the vision, roadmap, and some of the complexities we hope to tackle.
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We want to build a modular desktop architecture that defines clear interfaces between components. Components such as the display manager, desktop environment, multimedia servers, networking and other core capabilities should adhere to well-defined interfaces and remain implementation agnostic.
The result will be a desktop whose constituent parts can evolve independently, without forcing the rebuild of the entire operating system image every time something changes - one of the key differentiators from other immutable operating system implementations.
/etc is usually writeable XD
Unless you are on NixOS where you need to use nix for EVERYTHING
And how much can you screw up with a "sudo rm -rf /etc" ?
If ALL the software on the system was mine, that would be a reset to defaults, where the executable would re-write what it needs to default values instead of just failing to start.
Of course the whole reason for configurability is that defaults don't always work in all cases.