If you like trying new and experimental Linux distributions, you should be happy to know Manjaro Linux is officially jumping on the immutable Linux distribution bandwagon with the announcement of Manjaro Summit, in an alpha phase.
Having been in development earlier as “Manjaro Immutable,” first announced in August 2024, Summit appears to be sort of an experiment for the Manjaro development team. They’re now calling it a “semi-immutable” distribution, though, and did not share details on exactly what that means. Summit definitely differs from traditional Manjaro Linux builds in that its updates are “atomic” instead of being based on the package update system you find your typical Arch-based Linux distribution like Manjaro.
Summit’s announcement includes a publicly available ISO you can download and test yourself like I did. Since it’s in alpha, you can expect a buggy and limited experience not suitable for daily driving. Only GNOME is tested to work on Summit, which annoyed me a little, having been a fan of GNOME.
Manjaro Summit joins the ranks of Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite, NixOS and more in having an immutable configuration. Immutable Linux distributions are operating systems whose core files cannot be permanently modified by the person using the operating system. It doesn’t matter if you are the administrator with access to root because all changes to the file system, directories, and configurations will revert back to their original state on the next reboot. The OS is considered “read-only” because its files can be accessed but they cannot be permanently written or changed.
If you haven’t guessed, the appeal is in security and reliability. If a malicious actor can’t permanently change your system files, how much bad can they do? The same goes for you as the owner of the PC: how likely are you to brick your own system with poorly crafted commands if nothing you do changes anything?
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There’s more to like here than just those two (admitedly awesome) colors.
That’s not to say it’s impossible for an immutable distro to break. They still get updates, albeit downloaded as a complete image and applied on reboot instead of during live operation—where the word atomic comes from. Bad updates can still happen, but if they do, you have previous system images from past updates available for a simple rollback. If you have ever had an update to your phone or computer cause you major headaches, you can understand the appeal.
Since it’s so new, there are still things missing from Manjaro Summit. Right now, only GNOME is fully supported as a desktop, with XFCE, KDE Plasma, and COSMIC being technically available but not yet tested. If you are going to test it, though you should be aware of the minimum system requirements for installation:
If you meet those requirements and Manjaro Summit sounds like something you’re interested in, you can get the alpha ISO file from the announcement post linked below. The recommended method is with either GNOME Boxes or QEMU with Spice, and they indicate other virtualization tools aren’t fully supported. That said, I was able to get summit working though VirtualBox by making sure I allocated the proper resources and enabled EFI support.
Looking forward, the Manjaro development team said it would be “quite a long time” before Summit gets out of its alpha phase. They expect to do a lot of testing and modifying before a full release. In fact, they’re not quite sure exactly what Summit will turn into, saying it could be “… a stable rolling workstation distro, or an always moving distro chasing the latest and greatest in software.” Until that happens, they promise to release weekly image builds for testing, bringing additional features like full support for other desktop environments.
Source: Manjaro
