Congrats to the Debian team which looks like a fine release that will carry us for the next 5-years. Although I do not directly use Debian anymore its worth calling out that they have been a influence, driver and overall force of nature in the Linux distro ecosystem.
For those who dont know…all Debian releases are code-named after Toy Story characters. Bookworm being a minor character in Toy Story 3.
The way Debian always lags behind releases used to be a big issue for me on the server, but I’ve found that with almost everything being dockerized, it’s not that big of an issue. If I need to deploy something that requires the latest version of Python, I just run it in a container.
Having said that, on the desktop, I’m very intrigued by Silverblue. I just don’t think it’s ready for mainstream usage. And for that matter, I daily drive macOS these days.
Silverblue and MicroOS are very similar in nature. You have a strong immutable rolling core and then everything in user space pretty much runs as containers, flatpaks, etc.
MicroOS I havent had any issues with daily usage for the desktop side. Updates in the immutable layer are applied in a new filesystem level snapshot that you boot into on the next reboot. This also makes it easier to roll back if theres a issue. I think Silverblue does something similar, but not sure. Filesystem snapshots have been a awesome to have feature.
I use MacOS in the workplace, but often prefer my Linux setup over it (but its hard to break a Linux fanboy after 20 years of usage). MacOS im fairly certain enforces a similar immutable based OS under the hood.
With macOS really only the very core of the system is immutable—the kernel, boot loader, stuff like that. The rest is “normal” BSD. And unlike Silverblue, there isn’t really a file system layering.
Also you can turn off system integrity protection with macOS and it behaves like any other BSD system. The whole file system becomes read/write but otherwise keeps working as before.