your normal distro does updates by pulling every package on your system and swapping files mid running this can cause miriad of issues just by doing it and another miriad if update is stopped mid updating(not always but sometimes). So this means your system is being recomposed at runtime
while on other hand on bluefin and simialr image based OS-s composition of your OS is done somewhere else not directly on your running file system(could be your computer just not your rootFS) then it takes that image and pulls old image(normally on startup) and places new one in its place all in one go, so any composition errors dont get triggered during update and such. (composition before deployment is a principle cloud-native pushes) This makes updates far more stable and less error prone and automatic updates are a thing you dont even notice day to day. and what happens if image cant boot it just boots the old one or you can select the old one from grub(2 old versions are stored per default if i remember correctly) This idea has been successfully used by likes of android chromeOS and such to create seamless and risk free updates.
> This idea has been successfully used by likes of android chromeOS and such to create seamless and risk free updates.
Those are not updates, they are just containers deployments at the end of the day (Flatpak and all related technologies).
> your normal distro does updates by pulling every package on your system and swapping files mid running this can cause miriad of issues just by doing it and another miriad if update is stopped mid updating(not always but sometimes). So this means your system is being recomposed at runtime
In practice rolling distros so that every day, with very little issues. (Arch is a good example of that).
yes it is un update its not a container deployment and this is in no way connected to flatpak outside of ostree
well my experiance and experiance of many other people say otherwise and most wide reaching example look at how a single miss configured package(dependancy misconfiguration) deleted Linus Sebastians pop desktop.(and no the fact that he didnt read doesnt excuse poor package dependancies that even got to that point) that could have easily been caught if composition didnt happen at runtime
On non 0 number of occasions i lost or recoverably broke arch installs while it was updating using pacman just because X or DE's WM got crashed during update because of update. just 2 examples out of many for why composition at runtime is a bad idea for linux to be a more mainstream OS
Cloud native is a set of principles with which you develop and build software to make it less likely to break and be more conducive to rapid iteration(In theory you dont even need to deploy your app to cloud to be cloud native) ublue and project bluefin just cherry picked those principles that make sense for a desktop OS to try and bring what cloud native did for server world into desktop linux and hopefully make it not suck.
one of those sucky things about linux desktop is package management which is just sad at best problematic at worst which is why image-based and flatpak first
no project bluefin doesnt sell a piece of hardware but chromebook is far more known as a technology then the operating system it runs ChromeOS(based on gentoo)
so its wording targeted at layman
its more applying cloud native principles (principles that work very well in server side even if you don't use cloud) to create stable and well made "next-gen" distros
been using bluefin while it was in beta for almost a year and for me it was very easy to move to it as my development workflow is nothing like most and i heavily utilize podman containers on the outset and not system packager or flatpak. this is what i have been recommending to most at this time as it lowers friction whether you use silverblue or not, and enchances tability of your system as if you switch versions doesnt leave lots of gooblygook of orphaned files and such brokedness
