silverblue-nix VS distrobox

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.

That seems more like Distrobox to me(?) https://distrobox.it/

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39