I’ve got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I’ve been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while… I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.

Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?

Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn’t a favorite these days though).

  • Mordikan@kbin.earth
    3·
    3 hours ago

    I run NixOS as a daily driver and on a box for docker containers. I will say that it is stable to point that since nothing seems to ever really break, I don’t feel I really understand the configuration as well as I could (since I’m not having to fix things and learn).

    I started with just traditional NixOS but later moved to using flakes. Because of flakes input pinning, it’s much more reproducible but also even more stable. The biggest benefit I see to flakes is the use of local git for updating. Since I have git logs for auditing, if something were to go wrong, I’d just find that change in log and revert to before that commit hash (or just revert to different generation).

    The biggest problem I’ve had is how procedurally some tasks change and sometimes are made more difficult. Symlinks is a good example of that. In Arch, symlinking is just a basic one-liner. In NixOS, it’s a matter of writing config more verbosely to the configuration.nix file :

    (pkgs.writeTextFile {
  	name = "tst";
  	destination = "/bin/tst";
  	executable = true;
  	text = builtins.readFile ./scripts/tst;
})

    That’s a good takeaway from NixOS: things are more verbose in setup, but tend to get set once and never again.

    • novafunc@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      6 minutes ago

      I like Fedora Atomic with bootc for this reason. While Nix language is quite confusing and gets even more confusing when you find online advice that has a different setup than you that introduces compatibilities, bootc is just an OCI containers that I can run bash commands in to get stuff set up.

      It’s still not one-to-one. Generally, I find that using bash to set things up makes more things easier than harder compared to Nix. Though Nix does make some stuff simpler.

      That being said, I haven’t tried NixOS in a while. I’m sure that with a decent LLMs, today its easier than ever to make a competent NixOS config. I’ve been meaning to try, but haven’t found the time.