Known limitations

The things Immos does not do yet, stated plainly, with what they cost and where they are headed.

These are deliberate decisions and known gaps rather than bugs. Where a limitation has a planned resolution, it is on the roadmap.

No Secure Boot

Immos’s boot images are not signed with a key your firmware trusts, so Secure Boot must be disabled to install or run it. The boot layout is already the modern unified-kernel-image kind, so adding signing later is a build step rather than a redesign.

Whole-disk installs only

The graphical installer (new in 0.3.0) erases the entire target disk. There is no partition editor, no shrinking an existing system to share the disk, and no dual boot — and disk encryption is offered in the wizard but marked not yet available. To keep another system on the same disk, the answer today is a second disk. Alongside that, the installer needs a 32 GB target.

Full-size updates

Every system update downloads the complete image — about 4 GB — rather than only what changed. Simple and robust, but heavy on a metered or slow connection. Delta updates are planned.

Pre-Turing NVIDIA cards fall back to nouveau

The proprietary NVIDIA driver in the image covers Turing (RTX 20 / GTX 16) and newer. Older cards run on the open nouveau driver: the desktop works, 3D performance is poor. These machines are generally outside the hardware window Immos targets.

No firmware updates

fwupd is not included yet, because writing firmware means writing to the boot partition, which has to be coordinated with the system updater. Use your machine’s firmware setup or vendor tooling in the meantime.

Edited /etc files stop tracking vendor changes

A configuration file you modify shadows the image’s version permanently, so later improvements to that file do not reach you. immos-update etc-diff lists everything in that state. See editing /etc.

Hibernation depends on how you installed

A machine installed by the graphical installer has a swap partition sized to its memory and hibernates normally. A directly written image keeps the factory layout — swap is compressed RAM only, with no partition to hibernate into — so suspend works and hibernate does not. Reinstalling with the installer is the way to add it.

Native applications are deliberately few

The read-only system carries only what must talk to the hardware or the session: Konsole, Dolphin, Spectacle and KDE Partition Manager. A small starter set of Flatpaks — Firefox, Ark, KWrite, Okular, Gwenview — ships alongside it (0.3.0), and everything else is one click away in Discover. It is a click rather than a default, and that is the point.

MIPI/IPU6 webcams

Some 2023-and-newer laptops use camera hardware whose firmware ships in the image but whose userspace support is not yet dependable.

Not self-hosting

The shipped system contains no compiler, no package manager and no source tree. It cannot rebuild or extend itself; images are built elsewhere and downloaded. That is the core of the design rather than an oversight — see what immutable means and developer tools for the sanctioned escape hatch.