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?

  •  Guenther_Amanita   ( @Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de ) 
    15•11 months ago

    NixOS

    • “The new Arch”
    • Very customizable and minimalist
    • Semi-Immutable
    • Huge community and very old
    • Very different than others
    • Config-based
    • Not very (new) user friendly, wouldn’t use it. Too complicated for me

    BlendOS

    • Doesn’t offer much new stuff for me, nothing they offer is substantial for me.
    • Small dev team

    VanillaOS

    • “The new Linux Mint”
    • Huge focus on usability and user friendliness
    • Apx is basically only a wrapper for distrobox
    • Small dev team (the same one that also develops Bottles)
    • Huge potential, but not quite there yet
    • Will recommend it to new users when it’s updated to 2.0

    Silverblue

    • My recommendation
    • Is one of the oldest immutables and very well thought out
    • Biggest dev and userbase
    • You can not only install Flatpaks, but also everything else with Distrobox and rpm-ostree
    • Best feature: you can easily rebase to it’s other spins or the custom ones from uBlue I just rebased this weekend from the SB to the Kinoite-Spin in just one command. I was able to “change distro” without resinstalling, and KDE was installed very cleanly without leftovers.