Building your own Atomic (bootc) Desktop

Bootc and associated tools provide the basis for building a personalised desktop. This article will describe the process to build your own custom installation.
↫ Daniel Mendizabal at Fedora Magazine

The fact that atomic distributions make it relatively easy to create custom “distributions” is s really interesting bonus quality of these types of Linux distributions. The developers behind Blue95, which we talked about a few weeks ago, based their entire distribution on this bootc personalised desktop approach using Fedora, and they argue that the term “distribution” probably isn’t the correct term here:

Blue95 is a collection of scripts and YAML files cobbled together to produce a Containerfile, which is built via GitHub Actions and published to the GitHub Container Registry. Which part of this process elevates the project to the status of a Linux distribution? What set of RUN commands in the Containerfile take the project from being merely a Fedora-based OCI image to a full-blown Linux distribution?
↫ Adam Fidel

While this discussion is mostly academic, I still find it interesting how with the march of technology, and with the aid of new ideas, it’s becoming easier and easier to spin up a customised version of you favourite Linux distribution, making it incredibly easy to have your own personal ISO, with all your settings, themes, and customisations applied. This has always been possible, but it seems to be getting easier.

Atomic, immutable distributions are not for me, personally, but I firmly believe most distributions focusing on average, normal users – Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE – will eventually move their immutable variants to the prime spot on their web sites. This will make a whole lot of people big mad, but I think it’s inevitable. Of course, traditional Linux distributions won’t be going away, but much like how people keep complaining about systemd despite the tons alternatives, I’m guessing the same will happen with immutable distributions.