silverblue-nix VS toolbox

On silverblue, you just follow this guide and it uses a systemd service that uses the command chattr to make / immutable (temporary) but not the reclusive directories (that means only / not the contents inside the directories) by doing chattr -i / creates /nix and /var/lib/nix mkdir /nix mkdir /var/lib/nix then it bind mounts it mount --bind /var/lib/nix /nix then it uses chattr again to make / immutable again chattr +i / . The problem with microos is that the chattr command can't change atributes on the / directory. But is there like a way to have a /nix subvolume like how there is writable /var and /home subvolumes? Like how can you make it not part of the immutable part. you can go into the transactional update shell and type mkdir /nix and /nix is there but is not writable. Is there a way to make a subvolume and mount it as /nix and have it readable and writable?

agreed with that I only install drivers, distrobox, and qemu/virt manager on the immutable part and everything else is done with either flatpak, containers, or nix (it works on silverblue quite well. there is a guide for it)

fedora silverblue is good if you want a reliable system. you can also get traditional package management by using containers from distrobox or toolbox or you can use nix on silverblue

I find it quite useful for silverblue. I can install packages user wide or system wide without the need to layer packages. It gives me a mutable eviroment while keeping the core system safe. Proot isn't available for fedora but it is available with nix so I can have proot system wide with nix which is not possible with podman. Applications with nix start way faster than starting a podman container. It is quite useful. only downside is that you need to set SELinux to permissive (which really isn't an issue for me) there is a guide for installing nix on silverblue too.

Installing nix, you would have to disable selinux and if you use silverblue, you have to do these extra steps. it would be nice if all you got to do is type sudo dnf install nix (or sudo rpm-ostree install nix if you are on silverblue) and it would automaticly add selinux policies and automaticly have the .desktop files in ~/.nix-profile/share/applications or ~/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/share/applications for system wide automaticly show up in the DE launcher and also have sudo work with nix better. it should also work for workstation and silverblue too.

maybe install it on toolbox, distrobox, or even nix if you want to install something that isn't a flatpak. nix is good for installing other terminals, shells, and fetch programs so I don't need to layer. it also supports user wide and system wide packages. only downside is that you need to disable selinux.

you should give nix on silverbluea try

here is a guide to install it on silverblue https://gitlab.com/ahayzen/silverblue-nix

the nice thing is you can install nix package manager on other distros. it is very useful to use different shells and using neofetch without layering on silverblue. there is a guide for it

Never mind traditional package managers... you plug it in right, you can run Nix on Silverblue!

https://gitlab.com/ahayzen/silverblue-nix

NixOS people will prefer NixOS, but Silverblue seems like a nice complement to Nix if you need an FHS base system and want to retain some Nix-ish features like rollbacks and atomic upgrades.

The team has both made a ton of effort switching off their proprietary Skia based rendering tech and adopting standard Wayland, and has put forward huge effort to making running incredibly well integrated real Linux containers just work.

The headline is true. ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment. But it obfuscates the details. It's a damned by omission statement. It has some really good sauce to help you not notice often, but it's not at all a Linux desktop environment one can regularly use. You can do a lot of Linux desktop-y things but only through well crafted special unique wrapped processes that mostly but not fully help mock & emulate a regular Linux desktop. Even though it now runs Wayland, the apps you want to run will have atypical intermediates up the wazoo.

And no one else uses any of this tech. ChromiumOs has so much interesting container tech, does such an interesting job making containers think they have a regular Linux / FreeDesktop environment. It's far far far far deeper virtualization than for example https://github.com/containers/toolbox . But you know what? Google has made zero effort to get these pieces adopted elsewhere. It's open source but not intended for use outside Chromium/ChromeOS. I respect & think ChromeOS is a quite viable Linux, and it's so much closer to the metal & more interesting, amazing tech, but my gods Microsoft has gone 300x further to establish wsl2 as a sustainable community effort folks could use & target, in a way that ChromiumOS has done nothing about.

It's sad how Google has transformed from a company that appreciated & worked with ecosystems, that drove things collectively forward, into an individual player that does their own things & delivers from on high. ChromiumOS is such an incredible effort, but it's so internernally drive & focused, and it's hard to believe in such a wildcat effort, even though it's so so good. It keeps coming into better alignment with Linux Desktop actual, but via shims and emulations that no one else cares about or which seems marketed elsewhere. And that inward focus makes the whole effort both so exceptional & promising, but suspect. Such a different nearby but alternative & separately governed universe. ChromiumOS/ChromeOS do excellent at faking being a Linux desktop, and wonderfully have increasingly drawn more strength from that universe, but are still wholly their own very distinct very separate very controller other space. In many ways that's great, secure, good, and miraculously transparently done. But it's still hard to really trust, being such a weird alien impostor, faking so much for end user apps, and there's tension in believing ChromeOS will keep straddling the rift in pro-user manifestations forever.

I'm really, really happy with my current setup of Fedora immutable + toolbox [0]. This tool lets you create containers that are fully integrated with the system, so you have acces to the entire Fedora repos, can run graphical apps, etc. while still having everything inside a container in your home directory. That means no Flatpak required. Highly recommended.

[0] https://containertoolbx.org

Seems like toolbox is also in this space; https://github.com/containers/toolbox

With Silverblue the core repos are very similar to what you'd have on regular Fedora. With more of a philosophical shift about where you're supposed to install things from. The idea being that the base OS is immutable and you keep it fairly minimal - even though you are technically free to install any of Fedora packages to it. And then you install user applications through Flatpak and toolbx. Where these more user space focussed applications are installed to your home directory and are sandboxed away from actual access to your OS. With iOS/Android style application permissions like "Give app permission to access camera" and "Give app permission to modify files in home directory". Allowing you even further customise the sandboxing of applications. Do you really want that app to have access to your microphone?

I'd probably try running it on the host system first. If you want to use your nvidia gpu inside toolbox, you would indeed need to install the drivers in the container: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/116

Use toolbox on CentOS or Ubuntu if you want a Fedora environment with more up to date tools: https://containertoolbx.org/