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Comment by ocimbote | Hacker News Reader

I tried NixOS and failed miserably. I've pointed at to the Fedora Atomic distros, which are also immutable, and apparently incomparably easier to setup.

I'm tempted to give it a shot, with the extra bonus that I've never dabbed with a fedora-based distro.

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I’ve been driving Bluefin DX for a year or two. On the plus side, it works absolutely flawlessly. This is the longest I’ve ever run a Linux distro without a Nvidia driver update causing the whole thing to explode. It truly is the year of Linux on the desktop.

But I can’t say I recommend it for dev work. It wants you to do everything inside devcontainers, which I like in theory but in practice come with so many annoyances. It wants you to install Flatpaks but Flathub is pretty sparse. I ended up downloading raw Linux binaries into my home directory (which actually works surprisingly well. Maybe this is the future, hah)

I think next time I’ll just go with vanilla Fedora.

I tried fedora silverblue for a while, but the way it works is that it builds a new root fs image whenever you change the installed packages, this makes system package changes take comparatively long vs a traditional os. They suggest installing most apps via flatpak, which is okay as long as you can deal with flatpak idiosyncrasies.

I also tried fedora coreos for a vm + container host, but found the recommended method to configure the system with ignition files and one shot systemd units to be too involved for making a one off system, and it’s probably better for a cloud deployment with many identical nodes.

In all fairness, Nix is similarly slow.

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