silverblue-site VS distrobox

It's a relatively new concept for distros where OS core packages are locked down and user space software is installed in containers as opposed to added onto the entire system packages. Two popular examples are Vanilla OS and Silverblue

Some people has managed to find hacky workaround through the Flatpak sandbox to get certain apps working, and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite and Steam Deck has been a major pusher for Flatpak adoption that OBS released an officially supported Linux version on Flatpak and Spotify is looking into an official Flatpak release (as opposed to the current community re-packaged one).

I'm looking at current options, this[1] for example is packaged for Fedora, which is my daily driver.

But then I got to thinking, if I'm going to do a clean Fedora install for the tripwire (it's best practice) I might as well try Fedora Silverblue[2]. Silverblue is an immutable system so it kinda makes a tripwire less useful because no one can change any system files. Only files in your home directory and /etc can be modified statefully.

1. https://github.com/Tripwire/tripwire-open-source/

2. https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

Gentoo could provide a different perspective on how a Linux system can work compared to Arch, but if you’re going for different, then something like NixOS, Clear Linux, Fedora Silverblue, Ubuntu Core, or the aforementioned Buildroot is arguably going to be better because they provide more strongly differentiated perspectives compared to Arch.

Silverblue

Not sure if those can be considered "minor", but: OSTree, or more specifically rpm-ostree (Kinoite / Silverblue), and Flatpak.

After converting all my traditional Linux computers to Flatpak and using this setup for over a year now, I wanted to write a little ode to Flatpak. A brief introduction about me: I am a long-term (10+ years) Linux user that distro hopped quite a while and eventually settled on Ubuntu (vanilla GNOME installed via mini.iso) and now Fedora Silverblue.

You might want to look into a distro with an immutable file system like https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org

This is how other immutable operating systems (Fedora Silverblue) deal with development in immutable environments.

The way to rule them all Linux distros: https://bedrocklinux.org/ (or this or this).

Yes, the initial adoption is difficult as you retool your mind to think in terms of "I'll just install this in a container" rather than dnf install to the host. But the benefits of using disposable containers as a means of running software that you don't want to clutter your host with is quite amazing once you have adapted. Things like toolbx and distrobox have made this experience nearly effortless.

I use https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox if I want to try something on another distro

All of the projects involved uses the GPL v3 license. Let's just say, it is a pretty strict license that have been tried and true. While there are some pros and cons in the use of GPL as a license, it is a license that is quite favored in FOSS community because it sort of levels the playing field (coughEEEcough).

As for the rest, I've been testing stuff with distrobox, junest (which is like distrobox, but for arch guest and without the container), and Conty (a lot like Junest but as a single hyper-compressed executable file). Anything requiring an escalation or wanting actual access to root remains an issue, but for the most part, it works well enough.

There are a few reasons why the distro is notable. One, it's made by a very active devs who had also developed Bottles, a free and pretty wrapper for Wine emulation layer used to run Windows games and software. Second, vanillaOS started out with a simple "put immutable attribute to all files and folders in root" which is based on a simple sudo chattr -i command that can be used on any file, making it only almost immutable as you can also just remove the immutable trait; they have since developed a new system called ABroot sorta like Android's AB partition. while a lot of immutable distro expect you to know how to do what you need to do and at most just drops you flatpak pre-installed, not everything is available on the flathub 'store', so vanillaOS put in apx which is a streamlined version of distrobox made in collaboration with the distrobox dev to be able to run other Linux distro in container as well graphical wrapper to manage updates, drivers, and containers.

Add to that, distrobox, and you can run a whole separate distro in a rootless container. And what do you know, it appears there is a nixpkg distrobox container.

maybe you can check out distrobox.

maybe distrobox and it also won't clog up the system packages.