So, I recently got interested with the idea of an atomic distro, particularly the derivatives of Fedora Kinoite (currently testing Aurora).
What’s your experience with them? What are the unexpected troubles and did you manage to resolve them? Do you feel it’s worth it to learn the nuances of their use?
Also, on a personal testing note, did you manage to properly run AppImages and what did you do to make it happen? I couldn’t properly run them either natively or via Fedora toolbox on Aurora. (Also, I borked Aurora within 4 hours of trying to install Outline VPN that consistently had issues with tunneling).
While shopping around for a distro for my gaming box, I tried NixOS and Bazzite. Both were fine, but the atomicity made everything more complicated without any practical upsides for my use case.
So I’m just using Nobara, which is a gaming-optimized Fedora. For my laptop, I’m just using Arch, it’s much less hassle. The declarativeness of centralization of NixOS is alluring, but I don’t really need it.
I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”
As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.
NixOS is currently beyond my comprehension, sadly, but I keep an eye on it, still!