this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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I feel like I keep posting this everywhere but there's a project called AstOS that attempts this. Also someone clued me in on this distro neutral solution. AshOS. Full disclosure I haven't used either.
I'm looking to reload my daily driver and there's just not enough support for that.
Oh totally fair, it doesn't have a huge maintainer base for sure. But it'll never be anyone's daily driver if no one knows about it.
It looks like solutions like these miss the whole point of what Nix is trying to do. Nix comes with the belief: "Unix has some fundamental issues, because it was designed in specific way. If we store things differently it works really well, and we even get those cool properties for free".
The authors of those projects instead of thinking "this looks interesting, and it is a paradigm shift but it might be worth to to try feel like Linux noob for some time and start thinking a bit differently how the file system is structured to see if this change is really worth it"
Instead it is: "I don't need to be PhD in Computer Science (whatever that means), here is how I can force this Nix feature or two on traditional Linux, with ansible, bubble gum and some duct tape and make it immutable-ish, which fails sometimes but, hey, it has the same feature on paper."
Well to be fair I think it's because they aren't trying to be NixOS. You could leverage those arguments against any distro that's trying out an immutable flavor. Which is mostly accomplished through btrfs features.
I agree that Nix/NixOS does a lot more and it's a genuinely impressive and paradigm shifting project but it does break with traditional Linux layouts and thinking in a way that immutability doesn't necessarily have to do.
You could also make the same argument with the systemd and non-systemd crowd.
Either way I look forward to the future of both immutability projects and NixOS. I feel like both areas still need a bit of work but they're both really exciting fields.