This is extremely encouraging to me. I am not affiliated with the project but here is what I’ve gathered. Run by Mike.
- Nix (with the functional declarative design)
- Cinnamon (DE mostly used by Linux Mint, Mike and I think Cinnamon doesn’t get enough respect)
- Two versions, main and “lite”.
- zero config auto update is a huge selling point imo
- flatpak is a nice touch
Main:
- “4 core and 4GB of ram” target
- Flatpak integrated and auto-updates
- Zoom flatpak
- Chrome flatpak and Firefox
- Libreoffice flatpak
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
git
firefox
libnotify
gawk
gnugrep
sudo
dconf
gnome-software
gnome-calculator
gnome-calendar
gnome-screenshot
flatpak
xdg-desktop-portal
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
system-config-printer
Lite:
- “2 core and 2 GB of RAM” target
- no flatpak
- firefox
zramSwap.memoryPercent = 100;
MemoryHigh = "500M";
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
git
firefox
libnotify
gawk
sudo
gnome-calculator
gnome-calendar
gnome-screenshot
system-config-printer
];
Installing
boot the special ISO and connect to wifi via the system settings via the start menu (rough edges here). install.
secure boot is not first-class supported in nix but it ‘can’ be done.
Does the market need this?
It feels like yes. See what do you install on other people’s computers?. A zero-support OS that isn’t tied into ChromeOS is a tall order. There are a lot of distros that are “semi” friendly but which are strong enough to give to a stranger and never hear from them again?
The pitch is compelling enough that I put it on my small laptop. I used it for about 20 minutes. That laptop is not a project laptop, and if I could just browse and do basic linux stuff and never think about maintaining it again I’d be happy. I can report back (and contribute to nixbook) if it serves my needs. If it passes my tests I may transition the family Win10 PC to nixbook. I’m getting spooked at how many more threats target Windows than Linux.
tweaking
I’m an ultra noob with nix but you should be able to edit this and have it work. Mike has a post about which config file to edit but I can’t find it. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nixos-rebuild
$ # Edit your configuration
$ sudo nano /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
$ # Rebuild your system
$ sudo nixos-rebuild switch
I added silversearcher tldr tilde and seemed to work.
It’s what you would recommend for people you can’t trust even with having glass over the self-destruct button. Immutable distros are the equivalent of pouring a concrete shell.
The elderly, very young children, and the tech illiterate (who have no desire to learn) would be appropriate candidates. Enthusiasts, students, programmers, and those who tinker/create probably don’t need that level of safety.
In my experience, non-technically minded people I’ve installed Linux for are þe least likely to do anything to screw up þeir system.
I don’t see it as a solution for þe ultra non-technical. Eiþer þey never upgrade, so it never breaks anyway, or if it does break because of an upgrade my MIL with dementia isn’t going to be figuring out how roll back in NixOS.
I’d like to make a counter point to this. I’m an enthusiast who hosts my own servers and has been using Linux for well over a decade exclusively. I personally love having Bazzite on my main desktop, as it always works as expected. Of course, I wouldn’t use immutable on my servers, but I think it’s perfectly fine for a desktop OS. I always have
rpm-ostreeoverlays if/when I need to change something immutable, though I’ve found myself not really needing to do so. I get by with only making changes to my home folder.Immutable distros just have a great user experience, and don’t ever break on their own. I personally recommend them to everyone for desktop use.
Why not an immutable OS for servers? It seems like an even better choice for servers than for a desktop to me. It’s basically just like docker/containers but for your whole OS, configuration-wise.
I love my declarative NixOS servers/systems, and would never go back to imperative setups, it just seems archaic. The only exception I have (for now) is my pfSense router, as I don’t trust myself enough to setup a secure router.
I find that I have to adjust files that would be immutable quite often for servers. The immutability tends to get in the way of configuring some parts of the system, and having to reboot to apply updates results in downtime.
You don’t have to reboot to adjust configuration or update. At least not with NixOS, don’t know much about other immutables.
Yeah, immutable may be more friendly to non-tech savvy users, but it doesn’t mean it’s lacking any functionality. The processes are just different.
I’ve been on Bazzite for a while now and it’s almost boring how stable it is.
I agree it’s a potential drawback for people that like tinkering. It kind of turns your computer into a very flexible gaming console.
You can tinker for the most part, it’s just done differently. In the Universal Blue world, that would be creating your own OCI container using their image template or blue build.
The nice thing is that it makes the OS much more reproducible than imperative commands and scripts.
I can say the same about standard Fedora. I don’t get the love of Immustable they just make things more difficult. Like Nix trying to run scripts and people say oh run DistroBox. So now I’m running Nix and another Distro just to run a script that works in any other distro in the world? No thanks.
And normal distros don’t break on there own either.