A public alpha of the 'semi-immutable' Manjaro Summit Linux is now available

The future of Linux distributions in many ways seems like immutable may be a good path, and now the Manjaro team want you to test out their own version of it with Manjaro Summit. Originally called Manjaro Immutable, it's now Manjaro Summit and a public Alpha release has now been made available.

More about it as explained by a developer:

Manjaro Summit is a semi-immutable distro with an atomic update system. Updates are done by downloading pre-made disk images, the root partition is read-only and only parts of the filesystem are migrated upon update.

The benefit of such a system is that everyone is running a near identical system configuration, this makes it easier to reproduce bugs and issues. Images can also be tested before being published. And should an update prove to be bad, you can simply roll back to an older unaffected version.

The immutability makes the system more resistant to user and software error, it also provides some limited protection against malware.

We are still unsure what Summit will eventually become, a stable rolling workstation distro, or an always moving distro chasing the latest and greatest in software.

The technology powering summit is purpose build to be as simple as possible, it is encouraged for people to start building and sharing images and configurations which fit their usecase or that of a wider community.

There's still quite a lot missing and to be done on it, since it's a public Alpha testing release.

More info and download links in the forum post.