I’ve been testing out immutable distros, in this case openSUSE Aeon (laptop) and openSUSE MicroOS (server).

I set up Forgejo and runners are working, all in podman. I’m about to take the plunge and convert everything on my NAS to podman, which is in preparation for installing MicroOS on it (upgrade from Leap).

I also installed MicroOS on a VPS, which was a pain because my VPS provider doesn’t have images for it, and I’d have to go through support to get it added. Instead, I found a workaround, which is pretty amazing that it works:

1. Install Alpine Linux (in my case I needed to provision something else first and mount an ISO to install Alpine, which was annoying)
2. Download MicroOS image on VPS (not ISO, qcow image)
3. Write image to the disk, overwriting the current OS (qemu-img command IIRC)
4. Reboot (first boot takes longer since it’s expanding the disk and whatnot)

The nice thing is that cloud-init works, so my keys set up in step 1 still work with the new OS. It’s not the most convenient way to set things up, but it’s about the same amount of time as asking them for an ISO.

Anyway, now it’s the relatively time consuming task of moving everything from my other VPS over, but I’ll do it properly this time with podman containers. I had an ulterior motive here as well, I’m moving from x86 to ARM, which reduces cost somewhat and it can also function as a test bed of sorts for ARM versions of things I’m working on.

So far I’m liking it, especially since it forces me to use containers for everything. We’ll see in a month or two how I like maintaining it. It’s supposed to be super low effort, since updates are installed in the background and applied on reboot.