Updates and rollback
Sinty OS updates itself as one safe transaction, not as a pile of package changes. You should never have to babysit an update, and you should never be left with a half-working system. This is handled by Atom Loops, the deployment engine underneath.
What an update does
Section titled “What an update does”- It downloads a whole, signed image of the new version, only fetching the parts that changed.
- It verifies the image end to end before trusting it. What you run is exactly what was built and published; a tampered image is rejected whatever server delivered it.
- It switches at the next boot, all at once. Until then, the running system is untouched, so a download interrupted by a lost connection or a power cut is a non-event.
Rollback: a bad update undoes itself
Section titled “Rollback: a bad update undoes itself”If a new version fails to boot, Sinty OS returns to the last version that worked on its own. You do not have to recover anything or know that it happened. Only after the new version has booted cleanly enough times is it kept as the confirmed system, and the previous one held as the fallback.
If there is no good version left to fall back to, the machine drops into recovery rather than leaving you at a dead screen.
Your files are never touched
Section titled “Your files are never touched”Updates replace the system, not your data. Your encrypted home lives separately from the system image (see Your PIN, password, and encryption), so an update never merges into your files or risks them.
Under the hood
Section titled “Under the hood”The transactional model, the signing chain, and the automatic rollback are described from the engineering side in the Atom Loops documentation, and in full technical depth in the Atom Loops project docs.