Immutable distros and dot files / config files
Immutable distros and dot files / config files
I'm using Fedora Kinoite since a while, and I really like it. There's just one thing I don't understand, and have a hard time finding an answer to.
What happens in my home directory if I rebase to Silverblue? Like, Gnome and its apps comes with a lot of config files. If I then roll back to Kinoite, will all those files and folders still be there? How can I prevent this cluttering of files and folders that I don't want to keep? I guess the easy answer would be to create a new user and then delete that home directory after rolling back, but I'm wondering if something else will happen. Thank you!
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That's a good question. Kinoite does not version some directories, such as your home directory or /etc. Rebasing and then reverting the rebase will create some clutter. What I'd suggest is to use some utility to version your files, perform a backup before doing the rebase or snapshot your home directory using the builtin snapshot functionality of btrfs. Maybe something like restic would work for this case.
just a small correction, /etc does get snapshotted when upgrades happen and will roll back along with everything else. you are correct though that home does not get snapshotted and is fully mutable.
To add onto this, if you really wanted to rebase and don’t want config file clashes, you can use ostree config-diff after rebasing to show what config files changed. You can also simply remove all the files in /etc, and on the next boot, ostree will re-populate it with the contents of
/usr/etcin a three way merge. Just be sure to copy, at bare minimum,/etc/shadow,/etc/passwd, and/etc/fstabotherwise it’ll be very awkward when you try to boot again and your boot process fails because it doesn’t automatically mount your disks and you can’t login because you have no users. It’s kinda cool tho, that, at least for this very specific issue, those 3 files might not be needed if/when systemd-homed’s JSON User Records and Discoverable Partitions see wider adoption.(Note: this is dumb and error prone, and you should absolutely do what the other commenter said)