I think the main reason is experience on a distro with a crappy package manager that can easily result in a damaged or even unbootable system. Some of the most popular and even reportedly “stable” distros fall into this category.
You can think of an immutable distro as a system that treats the entire core OS as a single package. As long as you have that installed, it will boot.
Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.
Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.
My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.
MIT is a “free license “ and software that uses it is Free Software. See the Free Software Foundation website for details.
My only goalpost is accuracy.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
What an odd boast. What is it based on?
MIT licensed software outnumbers GPL licensed software two to one or more in most Linux distros and elsewhere.
There was more MIT code in the X server than there was GPL code in the world before Linux came along.
And even Linux will never be GPL3 or even drop its exceptions. So, while it is ironically the crown jewel in the GPL universe, it is not even really GPL.
“Linux” as it is used in the real world means “Linux distribution” which is a Linux based operating system that runs the ecosystem of applications and desktop environments common to the “Linux” ecosystem.
If people mean the “Linux kernel”, they say so. With few exceptions beyond trying to make GNU/Linux a thing*, people do not mean just the kernel when they say “Linux” on its own. Even the Linux Kernel Mailing List says “kernel”‘when that is what they mean. And you do not get the kernel from the linux.org website. Guess what you do find there—a bunch of information about Linux distros (real ones, not ChromeOS and Android).
People ARE saying what they mean because they know what the word Linux means. Swearing does not make you more correct.
If I say “United States”, only morons pop up to tell me that I need to say USA because otherwise people might think I mean United States of Mexico. Everybody in the world knows what United States means. Swearing and shouting “say what you mean” would be ridiculous. And nobody wonders if I mean the city or the country if I say Mexico. If I meant just the city, I would say so.
And people know what Linux means too.
The kernel is copyleft (100% of it). The majority (more than half) of the other software in a typical Linux distro is not copyleft. The most popular license is MIT. Apache 2.0 (the license that Android uses) is pretty common in Linux distros as well.
To top it off. the majority of GPL software has nothing whatsoever to do with the GNU project, starting with the Linux kernel.
This idiot has been writing articles over there for decades. He has always been pro Linux which is nice. Unfortunately, he has also always been an idiot.
People do not realize that Windows has, and has had, other subsystems. So the name seems dumb.
When you realize that as far back as 1993 there was:
then Subsystem for Linux does not seems as crazy.
Having “for Windows” at the end sounds natural if you only have one but putting saying “Windows subsystem for” makes more sense when you realize there are a bunch of them.
Regardless, the decision was made 30 years ago and not recently as people assume.
Yes, they do, via the mintupgrade tool.
Not sure why the downvote, other than that they specified “versioned” (not rolling).
All rolling distros obviously auto-upgrade by definition.
Our first “Linux put me in the hospital” story of 2026!
Ironically, the bug report I read was originally filed for Android as crashpad did not built with bionic either (bionic being the C library on Android).
Glibc is the most popular C library on Linux but also the most non-standard.
It may be that they are picking geographically close mirrors that are massively slower. The difference between connecting to a very remote mirror can be up to a couple hundred milliseconds latency and a few percent in bandwidth due to “the Internet” itself.
But the mirrors themselves can vary massively in performance. First, it may be older hardware that gets more easily overwhelmed. But it may also be on a connection with far less bandwidth. If that outgoing bandwidth is being shared across many users, you may not be getting much of it.
I am fortunate enough that the speed of the package manager itself would make a bigger difference.
But connecting to a slow mirror can be a killer so, If that was a frequent problem for me, it would absolutely factor into my decision.
I guess the other factor is how often you are updating. For a rolling distro, it would be essential.
On Debian Stable, I would care a lot less. Just let it update overnight once in a while.
As somebody with a dozen workstations running MUSL, I disagree. But you are going to want to use a performant allocator.
The issue with C libraries is that you will have problems using pre-compiled binaries that are dynamically linked against a different C library.
If I gave you a binary dynamically linked against MUSL, it would not work with Glibc either. It is not some kind of MUSL deficiency.
The issue of course is that most pre-built proprietary software was built against Glibc. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers are a good example. But all the in-tree GPU drivers are fine.
There is gcompat which pretends to be Glibc and forwards calls to MUSL from software that is trying to call Glibc. That may be enough to make things work sometimes.
So there are two answers to “what works with MUSL?”.
The first answer is that, if the software is linked with MUSL when it is built, almost everything works. A musl based distro could have a huge package library.
The second answer is that, if you are trying to run software that was dynamically linked against a different C library when it was compiled, then basically nothing works. This is no different than missing any other dependency. Gcompat is a hack that makes programs use MUSL when they try to call Glibc, and that will work some of the time.
As an aside, MUSL allows you to statically compile programs which means they include the C library in their binary. This allows these programs to run regardless of what C library is available on the local system. For this reason, MUSL is often used to create static binaries even on systems that use Glibc. Pacman on Arch is a good example.
Chimera Linux builds MUSL with mimalloc. As a daily Chimera Linux user, I can say that Firefox works pretty well.
You may want to take a look at their configuration.
https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/tree/master/main/musl
Why do you say that it “seems to work”?
If it is no longer visible on the network, are you sure it is still booting successfully?
I have never used dropbear but, if it is promoting for a password, doesn’t that mean the system has connected over the network successfully?
I don’t use Google Crashpad but when did you last try it.
I just read a bug report that says it fixed building on MUSL in 2023. The fix was to comment out a reference to user_vfp in thread_info.h and to put the change in an #ifdef.
I assume this is in the mainline by now.
I would agree with you. That said, bad experiences with things like PPA’s are one the reasons people reach for immutable distros.
I think as soon as you start adding PPA’s to your system, you should consider a distro with a larger repository. But that is just my opinion.