Honestly, having a declarative package manager is pretty important.
Consider the following: We’ve had the transition from Sys V Init to Systemd recently. But what does it actually mean?
It means, that instead of running a command to start a service, you now flip a switch in a clear, standardized way. The advantage is that you can get a table-like overview over all the services that are currently running. You get an overview, in other words. That is worth a lot because it brings structure and clarity into your system.
Now, with package management it’s the same way. Instead of running a command to install a package, we should instead give a list of all the packages that we want to have installed, and the package manager should take care of making sure that they are installed. That would improve clarity, because you get a list of all the packages that are installed. It might also increase efficiency if you’re installing many packages, because large parts of the work can be done in parallel. And importantly, you get reproducibility. Imagine you just have a file where it names all the packages that should be installed. You can just take that list and copy it to another machine. Now you’ve cloned your package installations. I guess things like Docker, with their docker files, are kinda already going in that direction. But it would be nice to have support for it in the mainline operating systems.
This is just NixOS with extra steps
Sweet, been waiting for this one. I wonder how it will compare to NixOS or Kinoite.
*Fedora Atomic
Its a huge bundle of tons of variants, likely 40 or so, if you take everything that uBlue, wayblue and secureblue produce
And that’s without counting the roll-your-own variants. uBlue has been a remarkable project.
- Fedora Atomic has been a remarkable project ;D
Fedora builds the container images, even though they themselves use OSTree remotes. There is a Change Proposal to change to them.
This means they continuously build the container images without even using them!
Only because of that the standard container workflow actions (they use an Ubuntu container!) even work. But for sure their tooling is very useful
Interesting. Do they point to arch repos or provide their own like Manjaro? I haven’t thought about a rolling release atomic distro before.
Just the Arch repos with an additional repository (similar to EndeavourOS), so AUR packages do work as intended and are in fact officially supported.
(disclaimer: blendOS dev here)
This looks very tempting!
