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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Flatpak is mainly for packaging desktop apps, whilst snap can update the entire distro (kernel, mesa, system apps, cli). Snap does things Fedora needs rpm-ostree for.

    In my opinion docker isn’t as useful for cli tools. I need easy access to many little tools, and this results in me having one container with everything. But that doesn’t work well with network capture etc. In the end being able to install packages system wide quickly is really useful.




  • Snaps are used for Ubuntu’s IOT distro, and also for their upcoming immutable desktop. They even ship kernel and mesa as snap, which makes updating less likely to break a system (in case of a crash while updating, user error, …).

    That’s why they push snap. Canonical doesn’t mainly aim to make a apps available to all distros like flatpak does. Just like now where all distros need their own packages, snap will coexist with other package formats.

    For the user it’s unimportant how apps are installed, as long as they’re available.




  • It is an immutable distro, altough it isn’t image-based like Fedora’s rpm-ostree.

    NixOS basically replaces Ansible because the Nix package manager achieves the same goals already (configuration, deployment, …).

    But I agree, the work necessary to put into this non-standard distro makes it hard to recommend for a casual user.


  • NixOS has benefits not just for developers, altough being familiar with programming is helpful.

    For me the main benefit of NixOS is being able to keep multiple systems in sync. For that I have 3 config files, the first containing all general config and packages I want to have installed. The other two are for my laptop and pc respectively, which allows me to make system-specific changes. E.g. tlp is only enabled and configured on my laptop.

    And NixOS isn’t just rolling release, it also has bi-annual stable releases, which is great for servers.

    Rollbacks are also awesome, altough I used btrfs snapshots a few years back with Arch for a similar result. With a bit of setup they are bootable from grub.