So I’ve recently taken an interest in these three distros:

All of these offer something very interesting:
Access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.

Both NixOS and blendOS are based on config files, from which your system is basically derived from, and Vanilla OS uses a package manager apx to install from any given repo, regardless of distribution.

While I’ve looked into Fedora Silverblue, that distro is limited to only install Flatpaks (edit: no, not really), which is fine for “apps”, but seems to be more of a problem with managing system- and CLI tools.

I haven’t distro hopped yet, as I’m still on Manjaro GNOME on my devices.

What are your thoughts on the three distros mentioned above?
Which ones are the most interesting, and for what reasons?

Personally, I’m mostly interested in NixOS & blendOS, as I believe they may have more advantages compared to Arch;

What do you think?

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    0·
    11 months ago

    You look at defaults and think this is linux.

    Look again at Fedora Silverblue /any other desktop variant. VanillaOSses apx is just a wrapper around distrobox, which is preinstalled on ublue even.

    Apx installs apps on containers just as it is possible on Fedora Atomic (the general name for all immutable desktops). You can also layer and remove apps to or from the base OS which is sometimes needed or nice for speed.

    On Fedora Atomic you have

    • flatpak
    • podman containers (toolbx, distrobox: like apx on VanillaOS but without the great tooling and GUI management, yet)
    • rootful containers for stuff interacting with systemd, needing USB access etc.
    • layering or removing packages / changing the OS to something like ublue to let other people do the work, especially for NVIDIA drivers
    • tanja@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      0·
      11 months ago

      You look at defaults and think this is linux.

      What do you mean by that?

      On the Fedora Atomic website, they write:

      Project Atomic is now sunset

      The Atomic Host platform is now replaced by CoreOS. Users of Atomic Host are encouraged to join the CoreOS community

      Do you think CoreOS is a good fit for a desktop?
      I always thought it’s more of a server distro.

      On a related note: Would you recommend Fedora Silverblue?

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        0·
        11 months ago

        Oh no. The rebrand is not done. There is no Atomic site yet, Atomic= Fedora Desktop with OSTree (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sericea, …)

        If you like GNOME, yes I recommend Silverblue a lot.

        Fedora has a very different system of the core distro. But with defaults I mean that they dont have apx by default but the same underneath.

        You could use a bash function for DNF for example, but in general it is

        distrobox-create Fedora39
distrobox enter Fedora39
sudo dnf install PACKAGE
distrobox-export --app PACKAGE

        for GUI packages

  • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
    0·
    11 months ago

    NixOS

    • “The new Arch”
    • Very customizable and minimalist
    • Semi-Immutable
    • Huge community and very old
    • Very different than others
    • Config-based
    • Not very (new) user friendly, wouldn’t use it. Too complicated for me

    BlendOS

    • Doesn’t offer much new stuff for me, nothing they offer is substantial for me.
    • Small dev team

    VanillaOS

    • “The new Linux Mint”
    • Huge focus on usability and user friendliness
    • Apx is basically only a wrapper for distrobox
    • Small dev team (the same one that also develops Bottles)
    • Huge potential, but not quite there yet
    • Will recommend it to new users when it’s updated to 2.0

    Silverblue

    • My recommendation
    • Is one of the oldest immutables and very well thought out
    • Biggest dev and userbase
    • You can not only install Flatpaks, but also everything else with Distrobox and rpm-ostree
    • Best feature: you can easily rebase to it’s other spins or the custom ones from uBlue I just rebased this weekend from the SB to the Kinoite-Spin in just one command. I was able to “change distro” without resinstalling, and KDE was installed very cleanly without leftovers.
  • lily33@lemm.ee
    0·
    11 months ago

    I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively. You can do that through containers, but you can do that with containers on any distro. Where it shines is declaring the complete system configuration (including installed programs and their configuration) in its config file (on file-based configuration, I wouldn’t really consider blendos a viable competitor).

    • hallettj@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively.

      I don’t quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)

      I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!

      • moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
        1·
        11 months ago

        (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)

        “Learning curve” is an understatement. Nix is one of the most poorly documented projects I’ve seen, next to openstack. Coming into it with no background in functional programming didn’t help.

        Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to package openstack on nix.

        But I’ve tried to package other stuff, like quarto, and that was a nightmare. Nixpkgs didn’t have an updated pandoc and I spent an eternity asking around for help, to try to package it. An updated version just got pushed to unstable a few days ago. The same matrix channels I joined to ask for help have been discussing this since then. Props on them for getting it working, but anyone who says that you can easily package anything, is capping. You need to have an understanding of the nix language, nix packaging (both of which are poorly documented), and a rudimentary packaging ecosystem of what you are trying to package.

        Don’t even get me started on flakes vs nonflakes.

        I still use nix-shell for all my development environments, because it’s the best way for reproducible environments I can share I’ve found.