So I’ve recently taken an interest in these three distros:
All of these offer something very interesting:
Access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.
Both NixOS and blendOS are based on config files, from which your system is basically derived from, and Vanilla OS uses a package manager apx to install from any given repo, regardless of distribution.
While I’ve looked into Fedora Silverblue, that distro is limited to only install Flatpaks (edit: no, not really), which is fine for “apps”, but seems to be more of a problem with managing system- and CLI tools.
I haven’t distro hopped yet, as I’m still on Manjaro GNOME on my devices.
What are your thoughts on the three distros mentioned above?
Which ones are the most interesting, and for what reasons?
Personally, I’m mostly interested in NixOS & blendOS, as I believe they may have more advantages compared to Arch;
What do you think?
I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively.
I don’t quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!
Another NixOS user (and minor package maintainer, if it matters) here. Essentially, NixOS is actually rather simple to write a configuration file for a particular program once you get the knack for the nix language and learn how to workaround the sandboxing. I would actually consider it substantially less involved as compared to (for instance) creating your own Debian package.
However, getting to this point will take a bit of effort, and this step is more or less obligatory to use software on NixOS, whereas it generally isn’t (but still is a good idea) on other distributions.
(There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
“Learning curve” is an understatement. Nix is one of the most poorly documented projects I’ve seen, next to openstack. Coming into it with no background in functional programming didn’t help.
Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to package openstack on nix.
But I’ve tried to package other stuff, like quarto, and that was a nightmare. Nixpkgs didn’t have an updated pandoc and I spent an eternity asking around for help, to try to package it. An updated version just got pushed to unstable a few days ago. The same matrix channels I joined to ask for help have been discussing this since then. Props on them for getting it working, but anyone who says that you can easily package anything, is capping. You need to have an understanding of the nix language, nix packaging (both of which are poorly documented), and a rudimentary packaging ecosystem of what you are trying to package.
Don’t even get me started on flakes vs nonflakes.
I still use nix-shell for all my development environments, because it’s the best way for reproducible environments I can share I’ve found.
