You’re welcome. If you insist, I’d definitely grab a more established derivative. Preferably one that pre-dates GPT-3.5.

Surprised to see that Dinit wasn’t even mentioned.

From their wiki:

What Makes Vostok Different? Void Linux is powerful — but it requires effort to set up. Vostok removes that barrier entirely:

• KDE Plasma out of the box — a full, polished desktop environment ready from the first boot
• Everything pre-configured — codecs, drivers, browser, fonts — all included
• Vostok Repository — hundreds of additional packages not available in the official Void repos (Brave, Figma, and more)
• Beginner-friendly, expert-approved — simple enough for newcomers, powerful enough for professionals
• 100% free — no subscriptions, no telemetry, no corporate strings
• One developer, one vision — transparent, independent, and built with love for the community
• Open to everyone — developers, designers, gamers, students, sysadmins — Vostok is for all of them

The em dashes definitely gives me LLM-vibes. Regardless, it mostly comes over as Void Linux with KDE Plasma and some onboarding. And I suppose they have their own repository. Furthermore, I think it’s a very new distro as their Github activities only go two months back.

To OP: Why would you use this over (some) other Void derivatives? Secondly, as you state

I can customize it myself

Why even bother with any of these to begin with?

Asahi Linux is basically top notch engineering for free. Unless it gets (really) big, I don’t see any reason for Apple to even consider putting it down.

Yeah, NixOS is excellent. But, for nix (or close enough) to be the future, an upgrade path should exist for other distros. But, for some reason, I don’t really see any such efforts. Like, where are the nix-variants of other distros?

FWIW, Bootcrew has created bootc-variants of many other distros. And, even before, both Endless OS and GNOME OS offered examples of non-Fedora distros with ostree.

EDIT: TIL

Overall, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.

The suggestion to just use toolkits toolbox is not for mortals.

I am also not convinced that it was ever meant as the endgame. Like, toolbox still doesn’t offer a mechanic to upgrade a(ll) container(s) without entering one. The last time I used it, it also shat itself whenever the old pet container became EOL and desired a ‘system update’ to become functional. IIRC, distrobox doesn’t fare any better at this. Thus, coming with what looks like planned obsolescence; with the recreation of the pet containers every couple of months as a result. I suppose the solution is picking an image that’s supposed to be rolling-release. Which is why I think this workflow suits Aeon better.

I could see it becoming the future. But only under a couple of scenarios.

Scenario A: It becomes (strictly) better and/or easier than the alternative. Kinda like how systemd effectively replaced SysVinit within a couple of years, simply because it was a more sane alternative. But this is reliant on the read-only aspect being put in place without affecting existing workflows on traditional distros. So, as Fedora Atomic is the atomic distro I’m most familiar with, I’ll provide explicit examples from it:

• Installing packages shouldn’t take a reboot to take effect. I can see sysexts being leveraged for this eventually.
• Any commands that involve dnf should (somehow) continue to function. It could even be an alias (or something) that invokes something else entirely. I don’t even think most users will care for what exactly happens in the background, as long as the functional expectation is being met.
• The previous two points shouldn’t come at a (significant) speed loss.

Scenario B: It’s enforced on us by (some of) our Linux overlords and/or expected by (parts of) the Desktop Linux stack. Kinda like how the GNOME desktop environment currently has dependencies that are systemd-components. Thus, requiring some hacking to make it work in its absence. Currently, I can only see some RHEL(-adjacent) projects committing to this.

But I think both of the above scenarios are at least 5 years away. While atomic/immutable distros enjoy a healthy (perhaps even generous) amount of development, AFAIK none of them are actually 100% feature-complete^[1] compared to their traditional counterparts. So, fixing (most of) the remaining edge cases to make migration possible for every enthusiast that even considers switching, should probably be their priority.

Not the person you asked. But the only thing I can think of, would be how the flatpak’s sandbox might cause friction. Most of the time, you won’t even notice it. But, once every while, it shows its ugly face.

For example, the situation around native messaging is still a mess. This prevents e.g. your flatpak browser from communicating with your locally installed password manager. While a(n ugly) workaround exists, it’s quite maddening that it hasn’t been resolved in all these years 😅.

Many different solutions exist, even native ones. But I’d have to mention Sandboxie as probably the most popular option.

• Step 1. Upgrade to proactive security. Projects like HotCakeX’ offer a streamlined method of attaining it.
• Step 2. Commit to best practices. There’s a long list of this, but the short of it would be:
  • Uphold a strong backbone of secure software that has proven to be committed to safe practices.
  • Ensure that your system and/or software is always up-to-date.
  • Don’t visit unsafe/untrusted websites. Don’t click on shady/untrusted links.
  • Don’t execute untrusted/unsafe files. Especially not with administrator’s rights.
  • Sandbox all activities. So that even if you’re compromised, that the adversary can only access very little beyond the binary/program/software itself.

First of all, I’m sorry I can’t provide you with a video; I tried attaching it to the post but won’t let me attach any other than photos.

Gifs work. There are some pointers over here.

You seem to have the false notion that corporate distros are safe (or something). But, that’s not true. Look e.g. at the demise of Clear Linux OS.

For (perhaps) a better assessment on whether a distro is well-established^[1] or not, consider looking at the following factors:

• How long does it exist? Like, if it’s old enough to drink, then that’s definitely a good indication.
• How strong is its community? If there are literally millions of users, many of which actively contribute, then that’s definitely a good thing.
• How active is its development? The Linux landscape is constantly evolving. Hence, adopting changes (or, at least, enabling them) is somewhat to be expected.
• Does it serve a distinct raison d’être? It simply has to offer a strong justification for its existence.
• Does it have any strong dependencies/contingencies? Here, a lack thereof is actually what’s good.

TL;DR: If you want to be absolutely safe, then I’d recommend Arch, Debian or Gentoo.