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An immutable OS can be set up to revert to the previous version if a change causes a boot failure. Or even a COW filesystem with snapshots when changes are applied. Hell, Microsoft's own "System Restore" capability could do this, if MS provided default-on support for creating system restore points automatically when system files are changed & restoring after boot failures.



What's funny to me is that in college we had our computer lab set up such that every computer could be quickly reverted to a good working state just by rebooting. Every boot was from a static known good image, and any changes made while the computer was on were just stored as an overlay on a separate disk. People installed all manner of software that crashed the machines, but they always came back up. To make any lasting changes to the machine you had to have a physical key. So with the right kind of paranoia you can build systems that are resilient to any harmful changes.


Right, an OS completely crashing like this is the fault of the OS and the problematic code.

An OS should be really resistant to this kind of things.


What other OS besides recent CoreOS/Silverblue/etc does this auto-restore of system files automatically?




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