So I’ve recently taken an interest in these three distros:
All of these offer something very interesting:
Access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.
Both NixOS and blendOS are based on config files, from which your system is basically derived from, and Vanilla OS uses a package manager apx to install from any given repo, regardless of distribution.
While I’ve looked into Fedora Silverblue, that distro is limited to only install Flatpaks (edit: no, not really), which is fine for “apps”, but seems to be more of a problem with managing system- and CLI tools.
I haven’t distro hopped yet, as I’m still on Manjaro GNOME on my devices.
What are your thoughts on the three distros mentioned above?
Which ones are the most interesting, and for what reasons?
Personally, I’m mostly interested in NixOS & blendOS, as I believe they may have more advantages compared to Arch;
What do you think?
Nix is better because you can use a lock file to fetch the exact revisions of each software. Even proprietary stuff is hashed so when you download it, it’s checked to be bit identical to the lock file hash before it’s installed
This means your setup on another machine is the same as long as the lock file is the same.
Also you can switch to an older revision, mix and match stable and unstable, keep your whole setup in a git repo. It’s basically everything you ever would want from a package manager (reproducible builds already done for the minimal version, soon coming to all 80,000 packages)