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Comparison between NixOS vs blendOS vs Vanilla OS: what to pick and why? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry for my ignorance,
but why is blendOS not a viable competitor to NixOS?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To clarify, I was referring specifically to its ability to specify the full system configuration in its config file - not overall. But I haven't used blendos, and my impression is mostly from a quick look at their documentation. They have a snippet with sample configuration. There, they have a "Modules" section, but I couldn't find what modules are available, what options they have, how to configure them if we want to do something more complex than the available options.

Then containers are clearer: they have a list of installed apps, and then commands to bring them to the desired state (somewhat similar to a dockerfile). But even then, i imagine that if you have a more complex configuration, that's going to get clunkier.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, that makes sense.

Do you think the use of OCI containers/images is a mistake/bad choice from blendOS?
How is NixOS different?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Do you think the use of OCI containers/images is a mistake/bad choice from blendOS?

No. It's probably the best way to run packages from Arch, Debian. Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, all on the same system.

How is NixOS different?

NixOS simply doesn't tackle that problem, so it doesn't come with containers out of the box. If you want to run packages from other distros on NixOS, you'd probably need to manually configure the containers.

I feel like you're under the impression that the three distros, NixSO, blendos, and Vanilla OS, have similar goals. I don't know about Vanilla OS, but the main similarity between the other two is that they're both non-standard in some way.

But they're actually solving completely different problems: BlendOS wants to be a blend of different OSes, NixOS wants to have a reproducible, declarative configuration (declarative here means, you don't list a bunch of steps to reach your system state, but instead declare what that state is).