I’ve got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I’ve been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while… I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.

Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?

Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn’t a favorite these days though).

  • ultimate_worrier@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    3·
    1 day ago

    NixOS is surely what I’d recommend.

    I like to tinker with an Arch Linux install using a VM to iterate quickly then translate almost ALL of the home dotfiles and preferences to deterministic nix code that absolutely LOCKS everything into place.

    Some essential features/projects to incorporate into a decent nix config:

    • nix flakes
    • home-manager
    • content-addressed and dynamic derivations (Eelco’s original paper writes about CA derivations as the holy grail)
    • cachix (local cache) and community substituters
    • forgejo (local forge with local CI to test nix flake updates for breakage and warm the local cache) I call it my “update canary”)
    • nixos-anywhere/netboot/initrd boot scripting influenced by NixOS-anywhere but extended
    • disko
    • impermanance (lots of work up front declaring what persists between boots but this one is ESSENTIAL. This module makes it virtually impossible for a compromised package or virus to survive a reboot if things are done right.)
    • sops-nix
    • nixos-needs-reboot
    • devenv/direnv
    • Trent@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      1 day ago

      I’m definitely going to at least try nixos. I’ve been reading tbe manual since yesterday and it looks pretty nice.

      • ultimate_worrier@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        1 day ago

        It’s really powerful.

        As a proponent of better, faster, more foolproof, and more elegant, I’m often jealous of some of the features that our brothers in GUIX are building with the benefit of hindsight. Also, I will admit that it really feels like NixOS is doing the hard work exploring a paradigm (and its inherent rough edges) that will effectively obsolete FHS entirely in the Linux world someday.