I just wanted another folder at /

where i get into trouble is when i do a bunch of nixos-rebuild —switches between restarts and some state ends up hanging around, so next time i do a reboot that ephemeral state is gone and whoops no internet
- Its the ghost, the ghost in the machine. Major Kusanagi would be proud
- If you’re not already, just erase your darlings.
  Then you can preview what files are lost on reboot (see blogpost).
  
  That was a really good read, thanks for the link!
- Not specifically a nixos issue, also at least nix gives you rollbacks

I just don't get these for a bare metal system. Containers? Sounds great. Definitely on board. Bare metal? Debian, standard fedora, or gentoo is what makes sense to me
- Workstation-as-code is pretty dope for enterprise...
  The idea of an immutable, idempotent, declarative workstation, from cradle to grave, tickles me pink.
  
  At that point, make it a thin client which boots from a network image and logs you into a terminal server.
  Then you have the hardware and software resources you need for your role wherever you are.
  
  So... containers that people log into...? Falls under containers
- Fedora Atomic has been working nicely on my personal laptop. Anything funky, I tend to run in a VM w/ libvirt (KVM/QEMU) or a container. Makes it quicker to fix if I break something.

Some updates after sleeping on it and trying some morning debugging:
It's actually either service being enabled that prevents login
It's a gnome-shell issue. Logging into a tty is fine, and shows that it's gnome-shell crashing when trying to log-in normally
Maybe it's time to go back to debian...
- Debian hasn't done me dirty yet
- I had this with a sunshine service being added as a user service in bazzite. I created a clean new user and it booted, confirming it was user based. Took a bunch of binary searching to work out what the issue was.
  I've since done my own autostart setup for sunshine and it's been fine ever since.
  Crappy UX!
  
  Yeah, thinking I might have to do something similar to start the services after login. Unfortunately they need to run as root, so it'll be tricky to avoid having a second password prompt every time I login
- Maybe it's time to join us in NixOS land. When you have the immutability on top of the whole OS and the language controlling it, things tend to work a bit better.
  I'm Sorry we don't have the "))))))". Just a weird ass language.

Wait, what? I’m legit not familiar with immutable distros, is it like you’re only allowed to modify certain directories?
- In simplified terms:
  You are allowed to modify stuff but it is not actually changing the install as is.
  This is achieved by different techniques like file system overlays, containerisation, btrfs snapshots and so on.
  The idea is to replicate the classical behavior you know from embedded devices that have their core functionality in ROM with even firmware updates only overlayed or modern smartphones: You can modify your system but in the end there's always the possibilty to "reset to factory settings" as in: the last known working configuration.
  
  So, baby-proofing Linux?
- Kinda. Generally the user files (including custom installed applications) are on a rw partition. Whereas the system files (OS files, root folder, etc) are on a ro partition. When updates are applied to the core system they come as complete images. No compiling from source on the fly.
  The advantages to this is that it should be near impossible to break your system. If you need to roll back to a previous version the system just/downloads/mounts the previous image. There is less flexibility in terms of changing system files. But the idea with immutable distros is that you shouldn't be modifying system files anyways, and there are different ways to accomplish things.
  A really good example is Android. Android (non-rooted) is kinda-sorta an immutable distro. Except it uses an A/B partition method, where the active system downloads and installs to the other partition, triggers a flag, then a reboot picks up the flag and boots from the newly installed partition. If anything goes wrong, another flag is triggered and it boots from the "good" partition.
  It's not quite the same, but at a high-level it kinda is.
  Edit: article I found about it
  https://linuxblog.io/immutable-linux-distros-are-they-right-for-you-take-the-test/
- Yes, kind of.
  Someone might correct me if I’m wrong but it’s that, plus extra tooling to redirect the stuff that needs to be writable, plus more extra tooling to allow you to temporarily unlock the read-only parts in order to do system updates, plus a system updater that puts the whole system more-or-less under version control.
- It's similar to using Deep Freeze on Windows where outside of specific writeable directories anything that shouldn't be changed isn't allowed to change.

It feel like so long since I've seen someone use this template correctly, so you've got that going for you 👍

I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.
Install as much as possible via flatpak
Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)
That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.
Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though... so... not sure how much benefit I'm really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That's something...
- Why are you even running arch at that point, for the DE updates?
  
  Honestly, just because I'm the most comfortable in Arch. I tried VanillaOS briefly, but it was way too annoying to install tailscale, so I went back to what I know.
- Byebye to your storage 😆
  
  Luckily, I'm able to afford more than an 8GB SSD on my laptop. 😆
  
  $ podman system df TYPE TOTAL ACTIVE SIZE RECLAIMABLE Images 2 1 2.775GB 2.293GB (83%) Containers 1 0 3.492GB 3.492GB (100%) Local Volumes 2 2 0B 0B (0%) $ flatpak list | wc -l 65 $ du -hs /var/lib/flatpak 12G /var/lib/flatpak $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/cryptroot 234G 31G 191G 14% /
  A 256GB drive is on the smaller side and I'm barely at 14%. Storage is cheap.
- Not judging but just fyi, that's like the worst of both worlds tbh. The point of installing independently of the base system is that the system is immutable and easy to roll back to a previous state, if you use a mutable system and also install packages with other means, you're working around a limitation that isn't even there and wasting more space to get almost none of the benefits (aside from easier permission control for Flatpaks)
  
  Really my main point of doing this was to try something different. I've been neutral on flatpak this whole time. I've never had problems with native installs, but I'm also a little judicious on what I try to install on my systems. The point of this exercise was to flip those habits.
  About flatpaks, I've learned:
  a ton of stuff I installed via AUR is available as a flatpak
  some flatpak apps seem to be a little less buggy than the native installs for some reason... (Thunderbird specifically)
  flatpaks use more disk space
  Distrobox has also been cool because I usually don't like to install random crap on my machine, but with Distrobox I've been doing just that. I can install random C++ libraries, Node, Haskell, Postgres, etc and not worry about polluting my main system I actually care about. In the past, I would take some time to consider if I should really install this random thing. And yes, I'd pacman -Rs pkg if it didn't pan out.
  I'm not sure if I'll keep running the system like this, but so far it's been interesting to run things a little differently.
  Things I've liked:
  Thunderbird flatpak is less buggy than Thunderbird native
  Managing flatpak apps via Software Center or flatpak is easy/nice
  Distrobox seems useful for working on different types of software projects
  Things I don't personally care about (but other people might and that's fine):
  using more disk space
  the fact that my main system is still mutable
  Things I didn't like:
  nothing so far
  I actually went in thinking I was gonna have to fight
  with the flatpak permissions, but everything has worked
  fine so far, so... not sure what I don't like.
  maybe I'll hit a snag soon and then I'll change my mind

Immutable seems like a good idea and it is for security or for a console-like PC but for any sort of intermediate or advanced user, it's not such a good idea.
- I suppose it depends on the OS. But the Universal Blue OSs, Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora are the ultimate tinkerer's OSs even though they are immutable.
- You're comparing apples and oranges if you focus on immutabilty alone.
  EndlessOS may certainly cater to the idea of being user-friendly but unbreakable, but I would consider NixOS to be an advanced distro.
- From my experience it's quite the opposite, cause when something breaks in guix/nix/bazzite you basically need to know how the entire subsystem works to troubleshoot it.
  You can't just copy paste some nonsense from superuser to fix it.
- Why is that? What do you feel is the downside?

Honestly, my current stance on immutable distros is: why don't you have a mutable distro and just try to follow the best practices without being forced to?
Install flatpaks, use Distrobox when something is only available as a standard package, but doesn't actually depend on non-isolated system interaction, etc.
This way, nothing breaks the way it does with immutable distros, but you still have a reasonable level of confidence in your system.
- For home? Yes. For professional use where you have to deploy and support tens to hundreds of desktops? Immutable + a proper build tool chain is the best thing since sliced bread. And when you already have that, a copy of that for home makes it good for home use too.
  
  Sure, I had to make that distinction. I only mean personal home use here.
- Yeah, I'm leaning toward this option tbh.
  If we got to the point where popular machines had custom images with all the necessary extra drivers etc, it might be a value add. But for now I'm not seeing a huge benefit
  
  I initially tried guix -> switched to nix with home-manager because it's got a lot better repos -> installed all user packages through nix on Debian -> nixos
  Before nixos I used flatpaks for some packages because nixgl seems abandoned.
- To me, the main advantage of using an atomic distro is that I use my own custom image. It comes with all the packages I need from rpm, and all of my config included. Switching between different machines is a breeze now.
  BlueBuild makes creating custom images super easy.
  
  Fair point!
  But again, this is mostly useful in a production environment, not as a home user imo.
- follow [best practice]
  Install flatpaks
  Dude. Find a security guy who knows about validation and supply chain risks. Tell that person those two phrases. Learning should commence if they're any good.
  Wow.
  
  We're talking risk for the system here.