This isnt a distro
I don’t think you know exactly what constitutes an entire distribution.
Then what is? And which authorities endorses that view? Or…, is it perhaps possible to arrive at that definition by (logical) necessity? If no such authorities exist and if it doesn’t follow by necessity, then how is your definition anything but arbitrary?
Unsure whether it fits with the rest, but I’d argue it is an innovative and very compelling ‘standard’ that is competing with everything else mentioned in this thread.
So, the basic idea is as follows: if it is so difficult to deal with the loss of the main package manager found on the mutable/traditional variant, why don’t we pursuit ways to not lose it in the first place and thus try to make it coexist (somehow) with the atomic model. Enter RakuOS’s hybrid design in which everything installed through dnf is overlayed persistently over the bootc-managed base system.
Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying! But isn’t that a problem with most repositories? I believe Flatpak’s verified is one of the few exceptions.
Likely no official packages.
Would you mind explaining what you mean with this? Thanks in advance!
Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up!
It has been my pleasure 😊. I really appreciate your kind words 🤍.
It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.
Absolutely. But, I think it’s nuanced and the lines are becoming increasingly blurry. If something based on Fedora can become something based on Arch (and vice-versa), if almost any distro has multiple releases/channels/braches, if software for/from any distro can be installed on every other distro, then… at what point is it truly “around these parts” rather than “with those not-hardcoded system specifications”? Kinda like how DEs can be (un)installed, and how those come with implications on how some stuff is done…
FWIW, uBlue has been brewing for almost three years now for their CLI stuff: see this issue tracker and this blogpost from Bluefin’s creator.
The distrobox workflow overall has mostly been superseded by better alternatives[1]. Though, for completeness’ sake, openSUSE’s atomic offering continues to heavily rely on Distrobox. But, in their defense, I think their atomic offerings are simply better[2] suited for it.
There’s sysext with its (WIP) manager, Brew Tap to tap into homebrew casks and some peeps even use coldbrew. And last, but definitely not least, nix support has improved over the years. And if you just want to use dnf, RakuOS’ innovative hybrid design allows just that; an image-based core you can’t touch (like the other ‘immutables’), but dnf works and is applied through a persistent overlay. ↩︎
Fedora’s container images are tied to its major release versions. Hence, every 7-13 months you’re required to set them up from scratch if you’d like to continue using them 😅. Even if this process can be streamlined, it’s IMO very cumbersome regardless. In openSUSE’s case, the containers are based on Tumbleweed. Which, has a rolling release cadence. Hence, it was meant to be used indefinitely. ↩︎
I just thought that the phrase “the distro you are using doesn’t matter” is used to combat the analysis paralysis that many new users experience.
And -to be frank- while Ubuntu and NixOS don’t even remotely resemble each other, I can’t be the only one that feels that most traditional distros do feel kinda same~y.
Could you please elaborate on that? Like, how did it become your first choice?