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?
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.
Personally, I tried learning nix pretty hard during a very short amount of time (which in my experience has been enough with other operating systems so far), and gave up.
I found the documentation really hard to approach (exposes concepts to the reader before defining them; uses popular pseudo-scientific, formally incorrect terms; etc) while wondering why nix had to make up a new language when dozen of very good purely functional languages already exist.
But this post has given me more names, so now I just searched for alternatives, using “nixos vs blendos”, and so I could find GNU Guix.
After a quick check, I would consider Guix to be the only real alternative to nix that I have seen so far, and, because it uses scheme (that I have some knowledge of), and apparently has a much more approachable documentation, I have good hopes getting to use it soon.