Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

Fedora Silverblue might be the best of both world for you maybe? I'd look into it at least. :)

If you want to do Fedora Silverblue + nixpkgs, then the steps are a bit more complex that any other environment because of the immutable / requiring `chattr -i /` and some `semanage fcontext` action in the `/nix` bind mountpoint to get things working.

In theory you can use the special nixStatic build of `nix` and it should just work with unprivileged user namespaces but in my experiences with Silverblue you just get mysterious errors until you get a bind mountpoint going.

Bazzite is a silverblue spin that sets up nix for you, among many other things.

I found Silverblue to be quite frustrating, perhaps I should take more time to learn it. IMO, Guix/Nix offer superior solutions.

The problem I have with Nix is that it adds a lot of abstraction/complexity on top of everything. This is fine for power users, but I don't see it ever being used by anyone else. Silverblue also imposes some additional complexity, but it's way closer to vanilla Linux than Nix is, and I believe the usability aspect of it is limited mostly by flatpak. I have used both quite substantially, and they both are good solutions. I love how easily I can reproduce my system in Nix from just a config file, and the ability to nix copy (with the entire dependency tree) to another Nix system is awesome. But I personally think Silverblue is an easier sell to most people.

I absolutely agree on the complexity of Nix, it’s an entirely different paradigm than traditional Linux/BSD distros. That said, in many ways the silverblue/ostree approach seems to be too much of a “compromise”, so to speak. To elaborate, the traditional approaches to package management is disappointing users, straining maintainers, and falling behind the needs of developers. While Nix takes a radical approach and totally redesigns package management, Silverblue would rather present an illusion of a traditional system to software and boxes up the mess in containers.

Ultimately Silverblue is trying to be an “immutable” system without the need to coordinate packages and/or software. And such an approach is highly appealing for enterprise support, but the end result is somewhat of a Frankenstein system. Of course Nix is not without its warts, I can’t stand its language and documentation is terrible.

Overall I find Guix to be my favorite of the bunch. It’s legitimately a wonderful tool to develop with, I agree with the emphasis of reproducibility and bootstrapping, Guile is a wonderful language for configs/scripts, and it comes with a great manual. Even still, I couldn’t recommend GuixSD due to the lack of systemd and the hardline approach to free software (libre Linux).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com