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Emulating NixOS' impermanence module on Fedora Atomic (discuss.online)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey folks! After using Fedora Atomic for quite a while and really appreciating its approach, I've been eyeing one particular feature from NixOS: its congruent system management. Inspired from Graham Christensen's "Erase your darlings" post, I'd like to explore implementing something similar to NixOS' impermanence module on Fedora Atomic as one step towards better state management.

Why not just switch to NixOS? Well, while NixOS's package management and declarative approach are incredible, I specifically value Fedora's stringent package vetting and security practices. The nixpkgs repository, despite its impressive scope, operates more like a user repository in terms of security standards.

I've already made some progress with the following:

Fedora Atomic's shift to bootable OCI containers has helped with base system reproducibility when one creates their own images. This process has thankfully been streamlined by templates offered by either uBlue or BlueBuild
Using chezmoi for dotfiles (would've loved home-manager if it played nicer with SELinux)

My current (most likely naive and perhaps even wrong) approach involves tmpfs mounts and bind mounts to /persist, along with systemd-tmpfiles. I'm well aware this won't give me the declarative goodness of NixOS, nor will it make the system truly stateless - there's surely plenty of state I'm missing - but I'm hoping it might be another step in the right direction.

Particularly interested in:

Best practices for managing persistent vs temporary state
Working with rpm-ostree's (or bootc') assumptions
Tools or scripts that might help
Alternative approaches that achieve similar goals

Thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't remember when this installer was declared stable for use on Fedora, I have installed it in May myself, so after that post.

In the issues tab there seems to be some problems still, like #1325, for me, at least, it's mostly all fine, the only issue I still have is that some things don't work due to the user's home directory being a synlink to /var/home/<username>, rare enough that I still use it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

lol. I initially had a better written reply that I was about to send, but I clicked on cancel instead of reply. RIP.

First of all, thank you for sharing your own experiences!

Secondly, in short, looking at the discord servers that are related to the uBlue project, general folk seem to have moved past Nix and use flatpak and brew instead for GUI and CLI respectively. Though, some community members happily report to be content with Nix. So, perhaps I shouldn't be necessarily opposed to home-manager.

Finally, I didn't expect to find a crossover between brew and chezmoi to effectively become a quasi-home-manager.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

clicked on cancel instead of reply

Aw man haha

moved past Nix and use flatpak and brew

That sounds a bit funny, when those technologies are just (despite me not liking to use this term) inferior, in terms of packaging, only flatpak really shines because of its embedded permission model, one of the reasons why I also still use it, though there are ways to use bubblewrap with Nix packages which I honestly haven't tried.

So, perhaps I shouldn't be necessarily opposed to home-manager

Yeah, I think you should at least give it a shot and see how you like it, it's not as easy right out of the box as the other 2 you mentioned, of course, so you should find out for yourself what you feel more comfortable using.

crossover between brew and chezmoi

That is kinda neat, but, to me, it really feels more like a last resort when you somehow can't access Nix, Nix is just that much more structurally sound than all the other 3rd party package managers that you can install alongside your system's, I say that mostly because of versioning that doesn't break, and package manager as well as configuration being all cohesively described with a single language, it's not exactly easy, so I won't say "what more could you want?", but look at the features of both to see what you really want first.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

That sounds a bit funny, when those technologies are just (despite me not liking to use this term) inferior

Perhaps I should have worded that better 😅. It was meant as a textbook example of status quo bias; anything found by default on a 'product' that's deliberately opinionated will see its audience gravitate towards said defaults. Even if those defaults are inferior to other options.

So, in this case, uBlue initially had a script within ujust (or just) that installed the Nix package manager. It wasn't necessarily the perfect fit, but it definitely had its use cases:

Installation of CLI software was better handled by Nix than the alternatives (read: either Toolbx/Distrobox or layering with rpm-ostree)
Flatpak was even more restricted than today. So Nix offered an additional avenue for installing GUI software without layering.
The nixpkgs repository supersedes even Fedora's own repositories in terms of available packages, effectively making it their atomic AUR.

But then, not long after the troubling conflicts between Nix and SELinux, brew was inaugurated as the de facto alternative for CLI and the rest is history.

in terms of packaging, only flatpak really shines because of its embedded permission model

Yup, can't agree more.

Yeah, I think you should at least give it a shot and see how you like it, it’s not as easy right out of the box as the other 2 you mentioned, of course, so you should find out for yourself what you feel more comfortable using.

FWIW, I have actually used Nix sparingly in the past. IIRC, it broke on me at some point 😅. That could be on me, though. Unfortunately, I don't recall the details. It could also be related to the hardening found on secureblue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

That's really insightful!

Also didn't know about secureblue, it looks really interesting, hopefully it can all work together