awesome-immutable VS guix

Interesting article!

My takeaways:

>"The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system’s runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this."

[...]

>"All of these technologies are essentially building

an entire OS on top of another OS

just to avoid the challenges of backwards compatibility."

This is basically using containers to replace all system libraries -- to insure that a downloaded binary app always works.

From this point forward, we'll use the term "API" to represent not just Linux kernel syscalls, but the totality of all library calls (system and otherwise!) used by a given downloaded binary application!

Observation: API (in-)consistency (AKA "Stability") one Linux version to another, one Linux distro to another -- is the real problem!

That's the real cause!

Because everything else, everything else, is effect, not cause!

The containerization, the bloated "everything but the kitchen sink" downloads, are the effect of the problem of API (in-)consistency!

Phrased a simpler way -- there is absolutely NO guarantee of consistency between the libraries, system and otherwise, of any two Linux distros!

So if a binary app is to run on all Linux distros -- then it had better damn well better make sure that the exact specific version of all of the libraries that it needs -- are managed by it, not the host operating system!

Containers and bloated library downloads -- are (unfortunately) currently necessary to provide this!

Related:

"Linux Library Mismatch":

https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+library+mismatch

"DLL Hell" (the MS-Windows equivalent)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell

Software Engineering: Bertrand Meyer, "Design By Contract":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

API Contracts: "What is an API Contract?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qM__ozdHCU

Eelcho Dolstra: "The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model":

https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf#page=11

Image-based Linux distributions and associated tools:

https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

Spencer Baugh: "Managing Dependencies":

https://catern.com/posts/deps.html

If you're simply in search of other immutable distros, then I would recommend you to look under the "Distributions" section on this page.

The answer to that question is out of scope for what is sensible to write in a comment. Also, because we're mostly still exploring what it is or rather what we'd want it to be. But if you're really interested, then I'd suggest you to dive into this wonderful resource. You don't have to go through everything that's found within. However, I'm sure there's something in there that peaks your interest and you can go from there.

Flatcar uses 2 partitions, A and B, you boot into one and then updates update the one that you're not booted into, when you reboot it it boots into the updated one. It's like Android: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab

I maintain an awesome-list of immutable resources here with a collection of talks and presentations from the people making the stuff: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

However I'm currently focused on desktop stuff since the it's a fairly common pattern in cloud already, I should probably write it up.

Semi-related, a few of us have started a community around composable OCI fedora images, and one of our images is intended to be used as a home server built on CoreOS with ZFS, cockpit, and all the goodies you'd need. It's still fresh and we're looking for help if anyone's interested: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore (Disclaimer: I helped start this project)

Some interesting links: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

Found this page for you. It has lots of resources, including videos and guides, about all things Silverblue and other immutable Linux distros, and their tooling. Enjoy.

Note, I haven't tried these two distros myself, but I am strongly considering moving to such a system at the moment. Here is some reading material in case you're interested: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable

> So what we are missing now is a 500GB framework that can write the config file for the programming language that is writing a config file for the actual program I wish to use.

That exists since 1960. It's called LISP. The e.g. https://guix.gnu.org/ uses with great success, the Guile Scheme dialect of LISP, to be precise. And FYI the "framework" is:

  $ ls --human-readable --size $(readlink $(which guile))

> inventing a brand new purely functional language programming language.

ISTM that if you dislike that, then there's GUIX.

https://guix.gnu.org/

Very briefly, AFAICT, it's "Nix but using Scheme".

And just wait till you discover Arch Linux, Gentoo, Guix, or NixOS.

https://guix.gnu.org for example. It did load before an update but it doesn't anymore.

Is it? Seems to me it's used for some pretty cool stuff, heard of Guix?

I think a "competitor" to Lua would be Guile [1], but I am not sure if it gets close to Lua in terms of lightweightness... it was designed to be used in the GNU project, with similar objects as Lua: to be light, easily embeddable. It's a Scheme (Lisp) so maybe not for everyone's taste... its "coolest" use i know of is for configuring Guix [2] (the GNU version of Nix).

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

[2] https://guix.gnu.org

No one said Guix yet, might be worth a look: https://guix.gnu.org/

GNU Guix! A fully functional package manager and distro heavily inspire by Nix. The primary difference between it and Nix being that it is almost entirely written and configured in GNU Guile, an implementation of Scheme (Lisp) and the official extension language of the GNU Project (originally intended to be for GNU what emacs lisp is for emacs).

You should perhaps utilize guix for your projects. It provides rather acceptable rust resp. crates support and in a perfectly reproducible build environment. But be aware, that it even tries to build even the rust compiler from source by going through all this nasty steps of its iterative bootstrap process. This can be a little bit complex and time-consuming, if you need an up-to-date version of rustc.