silverblue-nix VS rpm-ostree

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.

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.

Issue: https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/3944

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.

here's the documentation of ostree (the package manager)

Now... this was VERY alarming to say the least, so I went online and did indeed find an issue on GitHub.

And there are still some issues with layering. Some packages that don't behave or follow standards will modify files in /usr/local, which isn't supported, so you simply won't be able to install them on Silverblue. I think it's the same for /opt as well. (https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/233) This means it fundamentally can't do everything Workstation can, which is unfortunate.

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