Rebasing or upgrading question

General
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Just wondering, the immutable operating system base as a concept seems to be gaining popularity (from what I read online) because administering a fleet of computers becomes easier, and system ‘drift’ is avoided. Fair enough.

But as an individual user (not corporate/admin), I’m wondering if configuration ‘drift’ or ‘entropy’ as some call it, is still not possible when it comes to the writable places like etc, var and home? Especially the innumerable config files in etc and home. Particularly when a user keeps rebasing from one spin to another, upgrading, downgrading, upgrading again and so on. Surely some of the files will start to reflect illegitimate config options, causing program/system instability, even though the base OS itself is pristine?

And as a related question I’m wondering if it is possible to issue one of these rebase or upgrade/downgrade system commands while also telling rpm-ostree to wipe etc, var and home and reset them back to default state for the target image? Is that possible to do right now without having to reinstall or just delete the files manually?

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You are right that configuration files in /etc or /home/ can become misaligned with the system in /usr. But you can restore your configuration in /etc by copying over the files from /usr/etc. Some files like /etc/hostname are not included in /usr/etc for obvious reasons.

If you haven’t put a lot of work into the configuration files in your home directory, then you can also just delete them, because most end-user software has defaults and restores these dot-directories automatically.

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Yeah, this solves a lot of system entropy, but there’s a long tail of software out there that clobbers around things in mutable areas.

It’s on our radar! More info here:

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