Frank Vasquez
Frank Vasquez is a published technical author and frequent speaker at open source software conferences including the Yocto Project Summit, FOSDEM, Open Source Summit, All Systems Go! and the Linux Plumbers Conference. He has nearly 20 years of experience designing and building Linux systems. During that time, Frank has shipped numerous products including a rackmount DSP audio server, a diver-held sonar camcorder, an IoT hotspot, a home battery, and a grid-scale energy storage system.
Session
Immutable, image-based Linux has gone mainstream — on Fedora. Nearly every atomic distro descends from the RPM/ostree lineage. Debian is conspicuously rare, with really only Vanilla OS and Endless OS to its name. There's a reason, and it's apt: Debian's package manager expects a writable root filesystem, so the moment you seal the rootfs, the native way to install and update software stops working. That's the wall every immutable Debian hits, and most climb it with Flatpak or containers. This talk takes a different route — Nix. Nix keeps everything in a self-contained, content-addressed /nix/store, so it never needs a writable rootfs. The base is built once with mkosi and frozen (apt isn't even installed) and Nix manages everything that changes after that, reproducibly. The result is an immutable Debian rootfs with the entire Nix package ecosystem available on top.