awesome-immutable VS nix

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

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity