[iamcalledrob]

I'd love to have my system be declared in code, so I can replicate the same environment across a laptop and a desktop with minimal drift.

So same OS, users, packages, flatpaks etc. And a mostly synced home dir too.

Is NixOS the only viable way to do this? I don't like the path mangling that Nix introduces.

It seems like an immutable distro customized via a Containerfile could work too? Except rebooting/reimagine for every change sounds tedious as hell.

[aaravchen]

All the immutable system solutions out there pretty much all make your rootfs immutable, but leave your home folder and system config folders (i.e. /var and /etc) as mutable. It's pretty obvious that if you make the config folders and/or home folder immutable it starts causing most people problems, since in the vast majority of cases people just want to be able to persistently change the desktop background color or spaces vs tabs setting in their IDE without having to locate the setting in a full system config, set it, and regenerate.

This does cause some interesting tension in the immutability though. /etc in particular is really a mix of things that a sysadmin should really only be setting, and things a regular user may set indirectly. This usage has grown organically over time with the tools involved in the implementation, so it's not at all consistent which are which. The immutable system solutions recognize this by usually handling the whole /etc folder the same way package managers handle package installs that include /etc file: by doing a 3-way merge between the old provided files, the new provided files, and the current existing files to see if the existing are unchanged from the old provided and can just be directly replaced by the new provided or if a merge conflict needs resolving. Additionally, a separate copy of /etc is maintained associated with each available bootable system version so when you roll back you get the old /etc files you had before. Though this does introduce a system-unique variation since you now have new /etc being affected by the state of /etc when it was forked.

If you want all your home folder and system config to be identical, nix or guix really are your primary way to go, that extra lockdown of the user and system config is exactly what most people don't want for usability reasons.

I personally use nix home-manager on top of Aurora DX from Universal Blue. I have my nix home-manager config setup to manage only the things I want to be locked down in my home config, and to provide some extra tools that are easier to manage/supply via Nix than a system package manager (where I would need to do a whole system update to get the new version). My IDE for example is installed on a specific version via Nix, but I don't have Nix manage the settings of it so I can separately tweak as needed without need a home-manager rebuild.

EDIT: typo

[tmtvl]

Apart from NixOS and GuixSD there's also Arkane Linux (<https://www.arkanelinux.org/>), which seems kind of interesting, but I don't like various decisions it makes.

[jcastro]

> customized via a Containerfile could work too? Except rebooting/reimagine for every change sounds tedious as hell.

You can do this today with Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, and other bootc systems. The system updates by default are weekly and require a reboot but when you move most of the stuff into the userspace most of that stuff updates independently anyway.

[aaravchen]

In fact, if you want to use something like Nix on a UniversalBlue system, you have to spin your own. The "hotfix" and chattr solutions of pre-composefs don't work anymore. Anything that needs to go into a read only location and isn't package as an RPM requires you to "spin your own".

Luckily UniversalBlue makes it incredibly easy, they have a template repo you can use that has all the GitHub action setup included to auto-bills on every change, and directions for how to set it up. It took me about 10 minutes