Technical overview

GNOME desktop

The GNOME configuration ships a stock gnome-shell with the following notable tweaks;

• Dark mode by default.
• A custom wallpaper.
• On first boot most core apps are installed as Flatpaks from Flathub.
• mutter-dynamic-buffering patches included.

Filesystem

The following changes are made to the filesystem to make it function in an immutable context.

These directories are linked to another location;

• /opt is symlinked to /var/opt.
• /srv is symlinked to /var/srv.
• /mnt is symlinked to /var/mnt.
• /usr/local is symlinked to /var/usrlocal.

These directories are subvolume which are mounted at boot using fstab, these volumes are shared between all deployments;

• /root is a subvolume located at /arkdep/shared/root.
• /home is a subvolume located at /arkdep/shared/home.
• /var/lib/flatpak is a subvolume located at /arkdep/shared/flatpak.

These directories are separate subvolumes which are subvolumes unique to each deployment;

• /etc is writable and unique to each deployment.
• /var is writable and unique to each deployment.

Operating system

The following changes are made to the operating system configuration to make it function in an immutable context.

• A patched version of the libnss-extrausers PAM module is included and enabled by default.
• shadow, passwd and group files with system accounts are stored in /usr/lib, these are loaded by the libnss-extrausers PAM module.