In my experience, the most innovative distributions include NixOS and GNU Guix System (Nix influenced it): determinism/correctness, pure functional paradigm, declarative, atomic, departing from FHS for good, … And they are pretty useful currently: Nix has the most packages, both are declarative so can easily reuse the configuration and apply in infrastructure as code, can rollback, can use for development (basically a way better alternative to Docker), can use in other distributions and Nix even on MacOS… Nix community being generally more practical, agile and flexible, while the GNU Guix community enforcing more correctness (building everything in their repositories from source including all transitive dependencies) and software freedom as GNU/FSF defines.
Other distributions I could include are musl based ones, Clear Linux, Fedora SIlverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and projects like sel4, Theseus OS, but I don’t have much experience with them to describe them fairly. So please lets discourse about innovative distributions and operating systems, those which you have experienced, which you may be excited about.
Arch Linux. The only proper usable rolling distribution for the desktop.
bleeding edge rolling release is a nice differential that made me stay in arch for a bit more than a year. but i don’t see arch as innovative; it is a traditional distribution with a different release cycle, and happens to have an user contributed repository with many package definitions. Nix package manager exists since 2003 and NixOS since ~2005, while Arch since 2002.
Funtoo/Gentoo
Debian, for providing security backports, pioneering reproducible builds, and handling software licensing carefully.
Fedora Silverblue. I really like the stability of having a base image that you slap a bunch of Flatpaks on to.
i need to test silverblue a bit more. from the innovative distros i know about, silverblue is the most user friendly which is good. it takes the immutable store, atomicity concepts from Nix and implements them in a different way. when i used it, what I did not like was flatpaks were pretty limited (few available software). Another issue with flatpaks for me is the way they handle dependencies: the flatpak community does not maintain a comprehensive shared dependencies repository, so whenever one has to package flatpak has to duplicate many dependencies definitions…
If you want some more flatpaks, try Flathub.
Isn’t flathub enabled by default on Silverblue?
I’m not sure about Silverblue, but on Fedora desktop I had to manualy add the flathub repository, but it’s easy enough. I found the Fedora flatpack repo had a more limited selection of applications.
I find Fedora desktop to my liking: stable, customizeable and avantguardia. Just enough ‘blobs’ to work without losing weeks chasing down semi-functional drivers. Install software directly from their repos or through flatpack. They don’t try to reinvent the wheel like some distros.
indeed avantguard. fedora/rh is where Linux got many of its innovative ecosystem: systemd, pipewire, flatpak, … coreos, and now silverblue.
nix is a meme.
there will never be a solution to system adm other than understanding the damn thing.
nix et all are js dev playing distro maintainers to other js devs. have this pile of hacks that will work until next minor version update. and pray nothing like systed happens in your lifetime.
pick arch or free/openbsd unless you want to be a professional sysadm. and use kata if want disposable deterministic things that will only work for 5 or so years.
Unix sucks. Containrers suck very much too. Nix community is trying to make it suck less; they are pretty good at that taking into account the limited amount of contributors.
I’ll take a look at Kata, thanks for the info
I agree; Nix is better than containers. You can also run just nix-shell instead of installing Nix as a full distro.
i know right? now we use
nix3commands likenix shellinstead of nix-shell https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-flake.htmlalso flake.nix instead of shell.nix https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-flake.html
unix is about jugling processes on top of a kernel.
processes are just fancy processes.
kata/firecracker/qemu/xen are virtualization/vms they are the only thing that differ from unix, but so far by just adding a new layer to more unix.
nix is a meme because it pretend to be something else than a package manager with shared settings for a very subset of things. its basically an opinionated distro, but with dangerous illusion of grandeur.
nix is a meme because it pretend to be something else than a package manager with shared settings for a very subset of things.
Nix the package manager, and NixOS the operating system are different things. Nix does not pretends to be something else than a better package manager / build system for deterministic/reproducible distribution of software.
And by Unix I meant beyond processes… I meant all the imperative way of doing things in Unix and Unix-like OSs. Problematic FHS… I.e things that Nix and NixOS solve.
will read more on nixos then.
looked a long time ago and the selling point was just calling the common practice of a install-script black magic. …yeah install scripts are not standardized across distros, but they did start one from scratch too so :shrug and while that is nice, dockerfiles are more popular now, for better or worse (it’s for worse)
what i call a meme is all the promises that config sharing fixes all problems. yeah you can share your facy declarative build setting with 7tb of ram and running all compilers as root to rebuild your package, but i won’t touch it on my systems.
rest all seemed pretty unixy underneath.
there is Alpine Linux use musl and busybox and use open rc instead of systemd
I generally use Alpine for containers and I find it pretty good at that. I tried using it for some lower resources devices, but it missed many packages which I needed then. Need to give it a go again and see.
