For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
You can. Google pixel updates are just a reboot. Sadly many OEMs don’t do A/B updates, like samsung, so your phone can’t be used while updating the system partition
It’s worth mentioning that they often do this to reduce flash size, i.e. save 💰. Virtual AB was introduced to help with this but it’s relatively new. With it, there’s no need to reserve the space for 2x system partition. The needed extra space during update is taken from /data and released post success. There’s also a compressed virtual AB scheme now which helps reduce the space needed from /data to enable really space-crippled devices like CCwGTV and other Android TV things like Sony and other TVs.
Interesting! I didn’t know that, thanks for responding