It has always been rather insane to me that user facing applications share packages with the base system.
The atomic distro approach works a lot better for me. Would not go back to a "normal" distro from https://getaurora.dev.
The atomic distro approach works a lot better for me. Would not go back to a "normal" distro from https://getaurora.dev.
I run Debian stable, and it's not immutable, but it is very unchanging. I don't worry much about system libraries and tooling.
The downside to that is that then userland application are out of date - in enters Flatpak. I run most GUI applications in flatpak. This has a lot of benefits. They're containerized, so they maintain their own libraries. They can be bleeding edge but I don't have to worry about it affecting system packages. I also get much simpler control - no fiddling with apparmor, the built-in Flatpak permission system is powerful enough.
The blind spot then is CLI apps and tooling. Usually it doesn't matter too much being bound to system packages, but if it really does, I can always containerize those too. I only do it for my PHP dev environment.
Do you encounter any friction getting different containerised tools to talk together? Can you compose them in the classical unix fashion?
I basically did the same with Tumbleweed for a couple of years. Can't stand the point release distros. Lagging behind a year or two when it comes to the DE is not something I fancy. Never liked Tumbleweed much though. Felt very unpolished when using Plasma.
> The blind spot then is CLI apps and tooling.
I can really recommend homebrew. Works well. apt is for the system, homebrew is for user facing CLI apps. :)
Apps are bundled and installed like they are on macOS, and there's a very strict distinction between literal 'System', 'Users' and 'Programs' directories.