I still really wish there was a NixOS, but without the quirky filesystem/linking setup.
Declarative, but not trying to solve for the "I want 5 versions of python at the same time" problem. The weird NixOS filesystem is where 90% of my Nix issues come from. And I don't feel like I benefit from it much, if at all. Bonus points if this fictional solution doesn't use a fancy new programming language. Something like HOCON would be perfect.
I just want the same OS, packages and config on all my machines without allowing long-term drift. And I want the time I spend tweaking my Linux setup to be an investment, not a waste of time that gets thrown away when I upgrade. I know I could use home-manager or similar for my user-level config, but that's not enough.
I've been experimenting with the immutable fedora-bootc images and podman+Containerfiles, which works pretty well for this. But there's no "nixos-rebuild switch" command, so changes require a reboot. Fine for daily use, but very painful when experimenting. I did discover its possible to use the older dnf4 --transient flag to temporarily install packages, which is helpful.
I guess its a trade-off between easy tinkering (Nix) but frustrating filesystem vs fussy tinkering (bootc) but standard linux filesystem once booted.
Declarative, but not trying to solve for the "I want 5 versions of python at the same time" problem. The weird NixOS filesystem is where 90% of my Nix issues come from. And I don't feel like I benefit from it much, if at all. Bonus points if this fictional solution doesn't use a fancy new programming language. Something like HOCON would be perfect.
I just want the same OS, packages and config on all my machines without allowing long-term drift. And I want the time I spend tweaking my Linux setup to be an investment, not a waste of time that gets thrown away when I upgrade. I know I could use home-manager or similar for my user-level config, but that's not enough.
I've been experimenting with the immutable fedora-bootc images and podman+Containerfiles, which works pretty well for this. But there's no "nixos-rebuild switch" command, so changes require a reboot. Fine for daily use, but very painful when experimenting. I did discover its possible to use the older dnf4 --transient flag to temporarily install packages, which is helpful.
I guess its a trade-off between easy tinkering (Nix) but frustrating filesystem vs fussy tinkering (bootc) but standard linux filesystem once booted.