Distributive developers Manjaro Linux have introduced a new experimental assembly called Manjaro Immutable. This new assembly is unique in that it provides a basic system in the form of a single monolithic image, set up in read-only mode and updated entirely in atomic mode. The size of the loading image is 1.7 GB, and it only supports uploading in UEFI mode on X86_64 equipment, as well as in virtualization and emulation systems like Virtualbox and Qemu. Once the testing phase is completed, the plan is to give this assembly the status of an official version of Manjaro.
In order to create these monolithic system images based on the Arch Linux package base, as well as to install, support, and organize rollback to previous versions, the project uses the tools arkdep, developed by Arkane Linux. This toolkit, written in Bash, is a wrapper over GNU Coreutils, Wget, Curl, and Systemd. BTRFS is the file system used, with subvolumes utilized to switch between an active system state and uploaded updates.
The programs recommended for installation are provided in the form of Flatpak packages, with containers created using Podman and Distrobox for execution. Additionally, users can choose to disable changes in the root partition and use the Pacman package manager, although packages installed in this manner will be lost after a system update and need to be reinstalled.
To install updates, users can use the “Sudo Arkdep Deploy” command, and to view the changes in the proposed updates, they can use “Arkdep Diff”. While the default desktop proposed is GNOME, a separate system image with KDE is also available, which can be installed using the “Sudo Arkdep Deploy Test-Manjaro-Kde” command. Users also have the option to create their own custom image using predefined templates.