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Comment by circularfoyers | Hacker News Reader

Fedora Silverblue is potentially where the future of the Linux desktop might end up. It improves on security significantly, where the system is read only, similar to macOS, and all user programs are sandboxed within flatpaks (migrated from the preexisting RPMs of these programs).

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The issue is flatpaks. They want to be a sandbox as well as a package management solution at the same time, while being good at neither of them.

The nix model would be so much better for the latter.

Yes, I agree. It's kind of a pain to work with at the moment, but some more improvements it Silverblue is cool. Getting everyone to agree on FlatPaks may be an issue.

openSUSE MicroOS Desktop is another distribution exploring this space. It’s a neat idea, but the SUSE folks are still working out a lot of quirks (the firewall had to be disabled in recent builds, for example). How mature is Silverblue? Can it be used as a daily driver with minimal fuss?

Have you been able to get nix working in silverblue? The read-only fs makes making a `/nix` not very straightforward.

You’ll probably want to install it in a Toolbox [1] container. This is the recommended way to set up development tools; you’ll generally want as little as possible layered on the OSTree file system.

1. https://github.com/containers/toolbox

flatpak/snap have serious downsides and nix does a much better job of package management. The sandbox aspect is interesting but in practice it’s so far shown to break things in my experience

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