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Comment by mindcrash | Hacker News Reader

When scrolling down I noticed that Aurora is based on Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/), a initiative to create Linux distributions based on the same containerization tech which sits behind the likes of Docker and Podman.

You might find some extensive answers to your questions in the bootc documentation which is the container runtime running at the core of Aurora and other Universal Blue distributions, like the increasingly popular distribution Bazzite for Linux based gaming.

https://bootc-dev.github.io/bootc/

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I tried Fedora Atomic for a while and my takeaway from image-based distro is that they would work fine for fixed workflow, but you take an hit to versatility. The biggest pain point for me was Emacs. It’s one of the major hub in my computing experience and having workflows strewn across containers doesn’t help.

I personally run Fedora Kinoite (the KDE equivalent of Fedora Silveblue) and Emacs works fine for me. I ended up installing it as a sysext[0] and it works just fine. I did also use it at one point both in a toolbox container and a flatpak, but it always felt a bit flaky there.

But honestly, since Emacs is so core to my personal workflow, I think that it's fine to use a system extension for it. Alternatively it could be layered on, which would also of course work. After that, interacting with the containers is of course just using TRAMP to "connect" to them, and that of course works just fine.

[0]: <https://github.com/fedora-sysexts/fedora> & <https://fedora-sysexts.github.io/fedora/>

It’s not really about emacs, but the fact that it relies on software being available on $PATH. You could use proxy scripts for stuff that are in containers, but yeah, it’s flaky.

I’ve not encountered OS crashes for a long time, and I’m fairly confident on troubleshooting config issues. Image based OS could be fine for single purpose computing, but I tinker a lot on my PC. Anything that is declarative is usually an hassle.

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