rpm-ostree VS yabai

I definitely agree that immutability offers considerable value in regards to improving security. But arguably it's insufficient to pull the win over mutable Fedora due to the losses caused by the inability to install the kernel-hardened package and the lack of UKI (Unified Kernel Image) support.

Oversimplifying might have been the most sensible in this context. However, you might have gone a little bit too far as your description fits only NixOS, Guix and distros that utilize rpm-ostree.

ublue is based off of fedora and rpm-ostree, which is what "CoreOS" is today.

What happened was old school CoreOS was A/B partition based: https://github.com/coreos/docs/blob/master/os/sdk-disk-parti...

My memory is hazy but here's how I remember it: After Red Hat acquired CoreOS they rebased the entire thing around rpm-ostree, which is the CoreOS people know today: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/

At the time there was some anxiety in the community as to what would happen, as there was no direct upgrade path from old CoreOS to new CoreOS. Theoretically if we all believed the kool-aid we were drinking it's just a redeploy, no pets!

Kinvolk came along, forked it, and made Flatcar Linux, which kept the A/B partitioning system, and more crucially, let you just change a config file and all your old CoreOS nodes would just move to Flatcar and then you were good to go. So now if you wanted to stay on the system you were comfortable with you could just use Flatcar. If the composability of rpm-ostree attracted you then new CoreOS have you covered. Red Hat deserves a hat tip here because in their documentation/blog they explicitly mentioned Flatcar as an option for people who wanted to stick with what they know, which I thought was cool and how I discovered it!

Later on Microsoft acquired Kinvolk and and then people raised eyebrows. I have not checked in a while but the folks involved continued to do their thing and run it like a good OSS project, hold public meetings, all that stuff.

I use both and they're both high quality.

Whenever I was looking at using CoreOS, I was somewhat disheartened that automatic reboots weren't built in: https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/2831. Has this changed? I know zincati has maintenance window support, which would also be nice to have.

Doesn't look like it https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/1091

If you've got this far, please go read the rpm-ostree docs and perhaps read some github issues, it will show you what rpm-ostree truly is, better than I could.

3 - https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/

Now I've switched to Kinoite and it's more robust. No problems with packages not getting updated properly. If there aren't Flatpak or AppImage options available, rpm-ostree works well for adding packages.

The apply live stuff is the experimental command I was referring to. But looking into it a bit more it looks like apply-live was declared stable last year and they're just supporting the older rpm-ostree ex apply-live for the next bit. So I guess that at least partially addresses the issue. It's an extra command to run but I guess it's ok for now.

It exists! Check out [yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai), which is nicely paired with [skhd](https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd).

I have a 49 inch CRG9 and the best recommendation for window management is Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) along with skhd (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd). Yabai is a greedy window management solution that tries to fit opened applications in given space and skhd let's you easily jump between those using keyboard shortcuts. This has massively improved my ultrawide experience.

Only disclaimer is, configuring yabai has a slight learning curve.

Here it is. There is no visualization of the stack, which apparently Stackline in the other comment supports, but I don't tend to need that. Just being able to move between the windows is good enough for me.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/203#issuecomment...

I have been using Yabai for two years now and am very happy. For me, it's stable and you can script almost anything by using event reactors.

Yabai also makes working with a 15" display much more productive imho. For example, I can effortlessly and nearly instantaneously switch between browser and coding spaces by pressing hyper + w / hyper + x (I'm using Karabiner Elements to map capslock to hyper).

Since it's a common misconception, you do NOT need to disable SIP if you don't care about some features (noticeably, disabling those nasty space switch animations). For an overview of features that require SIP to be partially disabled:

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/1863

Also in general, the wiki on GitHub is very well-written.

You do lose some features[0] but I've found the only ones I really care about is focusing spaces, and you can create keyboard shortcuts for that in System Settings.

[0]: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...

I use Yabai on my Macs without SIP enabled. Here’s a list of the features that absolutely require SIP to be disabled: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/1863

But you don’t need to disable SIP just for tiling.

> there's still a ton of tinkering and tweaking you need to do to get Yabai really working correctly

This is pretty much true of basically every tiling window manager on Linux, too.

For me, using Nix-Darwin for MacOS and NixOS has drastically simplified my tiling window manager setup after initially doing the work to figure out my ideal config.

SIP is a feature that protects you from malicious actors with root (admin) access on your device. After they've encrypted your photos and drives and changed your passwords, it prevents them from making your machine unbootable by deleting or altering system binaries. As a side effect of this protection, you give up certain freedoms to customize your system.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

For instance requires SIP to be disabled.

I feel the same way. I would much prefer no animation at all, and an instant transition to another space.

Apparently this is possible with [yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai), but it requires disabling system integrity protection which I am personally uncomfortable with.

This is disproven by the fact that Yabai [1] can instantly swap spaces with SIP disabled.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai