worldofgeese @ worldofgeese @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, "cruft" accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as "immutable". Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don't leave the system in an inconsistent state.

What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

Is that helpful at all? There's also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.

Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that's a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.

That's very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally "pure": no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That's a Dev Container.

It should be harder to support Docker, which hasn't released a new open source product since before Docker Desktop, which is also proprietary. Podman Desktop? OSS. It'd be hard to name a product Red Hat supports that isn't OSS.

For what it's worth, I just wrote up a compose.yaml file as I'd write it for Docker Compose and it just worked. See the bottom of my comment on this GitHub issue for an example. I think the team's intention is for it to transparently support whatever you'd write for a standard Compose file but of course we don't have things like the brand new Docker watch. They do point to the Compose spec in the Podman Compose README. Bind mounts are good enough for me, thus far.

That's what I thought but I've tried five or so images without success including the more mainstream ones like Fedora.

The old homegrown Pardus was really something special with its Kaptan system configuration tool and PiSi package manager.

I love Guix and want to see it get more recognition but I've never been able to get Distrobox working on Guix System, have you? I opened a discussion on the Distrobox GitHub but it was quickly closed.

I use Guix Home too and love it! Never been able to figure out how to get git-annex to work, especially on an Android device.

I used to use this but nowadays I prefer the single, declarative file approach of Guix Home and Home Manager.

Can't believe I'm the first one to come in with Guix System!! I like it because, just like NixOS, it's immutable, declarative and pure. I also dig that everything is written in Guile Scheme, a full-fat programming language. You don't need to know the language exhaustively to get started. There's some wonderful folks in the community though it's a bit spread out since not everyone wants to chat on IRC and mailing lists.

The Guix sublemmy.

I believe Logseq also has this built-in via Tldraw integration and it's fully FOSS which I dig.

Hey I live in Denmark! How unexpected it is to hear Linux runs in some municipalities: in my sector you only hear of Microsoft running on most of the public infra but my knowledge is limited to Copenhagen.

Hey, thank you for this comprehensive feedback! I've emailed the guix-devel mailing list to draw attention to your critique because I think it's important.

Sorry, I should have clarified: Bluetooth or USB-connected trackpad. I use a fancy mechanical keyboard so I need some other input device that isn't my laptop's integrated trackpad.

Come over to team Guix System, we have cookies 🍪

I use Linux on my home desktop and my work desktop but I also keep a Windows install on my work machine when I need to test Windows things there. On Windows, I haven't found a better Git GUI than fork.dev. It's not open-source but it is what one of my favorite creators calls "organic software": Ukrainian husband and wife duo that warms my heart. The evaluation period is unlimited without nags. I've found it to be the perfect Git teaching tool and the best merge conflict resolver I've ever seen.

I'm very sad I paid for a Fold and don't get 7 years of updates.

I'd say Racket is the most different of any Scheme I know but it's not hard to get started if you know one or the other. Racket (in my opinion) has more niceties around the development experience than Guile and a pretty dang good IDE if you ask me.

My employer, garden.io, offers pipelines you can run anywhere: in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, locally, wherever! We capture all your dependencies in a dependency graph, then cache all your inputs: builds, tests, run scripts. We're open source at https://github.com/garden-io/garden

Racket but I'll take Guile Scheme as a close second. Then Hy, a lisp dialect of Python. I'm writing a blog written in a DSL of Racket right now, Pollen, that makes authoring a joyful experience. Hy gives me access to the entire Python ecosystem plus access to things like macros. Guile Scheme is the configuration language of the Linux distribution, Guix System. Guile's G-Expressions are so powerful for writing packages.