What's next
Roadmap
Where Immos is going, roughly in the order it is being built — and the trade-offs that were chosen deliberately along the way.
Recently shipped
A graphical installer — 0.3.0
The one people asked for first. The installer medium boots a live Plasma session with a wizard: language, a requirements check, a whole-disk picker with the layout previewed, one account page offering local, managed or domain setup. It writes the same image the update server ships, adds swap sized to memory so installed machines hibernate, and removes the live session’s built-in account. It ships on a medium of its own, so none of it exists on an installed system.
Shipped with it: Active Directory join and managed mode for machines that belong to a fleet or a family, an animated boot from firmware to desktop, fully pinned reproducible builds with offline rebuild archives, and distrobox containers for developer tooling.
Next
Secure Boot
In increasing order of effort: document self-enrolment for enthusiasts who want to sign with their own key; build key generation and enrolment into the installer; or pursue a signed shim, which only makes sense with real adoption behind it. The boot layout is already the modern unified-image kind, so any of these is a signing step at build time rather than a change to how the system boots.
Verified images
Integrity is checked today at download time. The next step is checking it continuously at read time, so a system image is verified as it is used rather than once when it arrives. This pairs naturally with Secure Boot to give a complete chain from firmware to running system.
After that
Delta updates
Full images are simple and robust, and about 4 GB. Sending only what changed between two versions would cut that dramatically. Two approaches are being evaluated; neither changes the update model, only the transport.
Updates without the terminal
The updater is command-line first today. Discover has a backend interface for exactly this, so system updates can appear alongside application updates where you would expect to find them. Scheduled background updates already exist and are switched off by default; the intent is to make them the default once the update path has more mileage.
Firmware updates
fwupd needs a policy for writing to the boot partition that does not collide with the system
updater. Worth doing properly rather than quickly.
Parental controls
Screen time and per-user limits ride on the managed-mode bundle machinery; the format reserves the fields and the interface is the work.
Hardware breadth
An optional image variant built for newer processors, with the current build remaining the compatibility floor. Fingerprint readers and the newer MIPI camera stack as their support matures.
Chosen trade-offs
Some things are not on the roadmap because they are decisions rather than gaps.
| Decision | Why |
|---|---|
| UEFI only, no legacy BIOS | Every machine in the supported hardware window is UEFI |
| Full-image updates in this release | Simplicity, and a well-understood update client — deltas are an optimisation, not a redesign |
| Whole-disk installs, no dual boot, no encryption yet | One layout, previewed and tested, that the updater understands; sharing a disk and encrypting one are real features that come after the basics are solid |
| No hibernation on directly written images | The factory layout has no swap partition. The installer adds one sized to memory, so installed machines hibernate and dd’d images suspend only |
Edited /etc files stop tracking vendor defaults |
Three-way merging configuration is a large amount of machinery for a small benefit; immos-update etc-diff gives visibility instead |
| Pre-Turing NVIDIA falls back to nouveau | The open kernel driver covers Turing and newer, which is essentially the whole supported hardware window |
| Very few native applications | The point of the distribution. Everything that is an application window comes from Flathub |
| The system cannot rebuild itself | No compiler, no package manager, no source tree in the shipped image. This is the guarantee, not a missing feature |
Following along
Development happens in the open. The design documents, build pipeline and issue tracker are all in the repository, and releases are announced in the news.