Excellent insight, thank you (once again)!

While not much, this is the kind of endorsement I wanted out of this. Even though I was being deliberately horrid at communicating that 😜.

Hehe, that’s very close to my reaction when I first heard about it 😜. I wasn’t able to find any of the technical details either, so I approached them through one of their community channels and they’ve been very patient and helpful. So, IIUC, they leverage bootc usr-overlay. But where bootc usr-overlay is transient, thus making anything installed through dnf go away on every reboot. RakuOS has somehow hacked their way to make it persistent instead. For more details, I’d suggest making contact with them. Perhaps you can retrofit their solution to your own system 😉.

Ah, okay. I do concede that -historically- Fedora wasn’t robust, no. They weren’t shy about breaking changes, which even led them to be referred to as Red Hat’s test bed distro by the community and beyond.

However, for (at least) the last 5 years or so, Fedora’s direction has changed significantly. I’m not entirely sure what prompted this change, but it has definitely been a welcome one. For example: most recently, Fedora has somewhat even formalized this new approach with their new initiative.

Basically, Fedora wants to be innovative like they’ve always been known for. But, this shouldn’t come at the cost of alienating your own user base. Thus, the proposal details how these two perspectives can see eye to eye with each other.

As for KDE Plasma; again -historically- it has been a second-class citizen on Fedora; at least, compared to GNOME. But, KDE Plasma has since been promoted. There’s no meaningful difference between the two variants when it comes to how Fedora regards them. Even the website alludes to this:

Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.

Why do you think that?

Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro)

If you mean that they’re more stable, then I simply have to assume that you think those are more robust than Fedora (because the other interpretation^[1] wouldn’t make any sense). Which (again) begs the question… why do you think that?

like how fedora atomic desktop is to ublue

Great analogy! Even though I’m pretty caught up with the whole bootc shebang, I didn’t make that connection between Guix and rde. Thank you!

Alright, that was quite illuminating. I suppose I was definitely not grasping the full extent of the extensibility found on Guix. And, perhaps more importantly, how it’s a defining feature of Guix. Thank you; I appreciate it.

Perhaps I’m being too romantic, but just like how rde users were the first to catch a glimpse of guix home, so too it feels that today’s rde users are catching a glimpse of features that will eventually land on Guix proper.

Alright, that has been a bit more elucidating. Thank you!

I’m literally a newb to Guix, so please forgive me for my ignorance.

But while using (parts of) rde by regarding it as a channel is found within its documentation, I don’t think it’s the full picture. Like, rde is also a distro, at least by the admission of its creator. The same can not be said about nonguix. So, to be frank, I don’t think it’s just another Guix channel.

Having said that, I am still very new to all of this. So, if I’m incorrect and/or my understanding is lacking, then please feel free to correct/educate me on this.

While I think hearing about the sequence is cool as well, I was actually more interested in the (in)direct motivation behind it. Like, how did Arch Linux (specifically) manage to pique your interest?

Understood. Thank you.

Arch was my first choice

Could you please elaborate on that? Like, how did it become your first choice?

This isnt a distro

I don’t think you know exactly what constitutes an entire distribution.

Then what is? And which authorities endorses that view? Or…, is it perhaps possible to arrive at that definition by (logical) necessity? If no such authorities exist and if it doesn’t follow by necessity, then how is your definition anything but arbitrary?

Unsure whether it fits with the rest, but I’d argue it is an innovative and very compelling ‘standard’ that is competing with everything else mentioned in this thread.

So, the basic idea is as follows: if it is so difficult to deal with the loss of the main package manager found on the mutable/traditional variant, why don’t we pursuit ways to not lose it in the first place and thus try to make it coexist (somehow) with the atomic model. Enter RakuOS’s hybrid design in which everything installed through dnf is overlayed persistently over the bootc-managed base system.

Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying! But isn’t that a problem with most repositories? I believe Flatpak’s verified is one of the few exceptions.

Likely no official packages.

Would you mind explaining what you mean with this? Thanks in advance!

Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up!

It has been my pleasure 😊. I really appreciate your kind words 🤍.

It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.

Absolutely. But, I think it’s nuanced and the lines are becoming increasingly blurry. If something based on Fedora can become something based on Arch (and vice-versa), if almost any distro has multiple releases/channels/braches, if software for/from any distro can be installed on every other distro, then… at what point is it truly “around these parts” rather than “with those not-hardcoded system specifications”? Kinda like how DEs can be (un)installed, and how those come with implications on how some stuff is done…

FWIW, uBlue has been brewing for almost three years now for their CLI stuff: see this issue tracker and this blogpost from Bluefin’s creator.

The distrobox workflow overall has mostly been superseded by better alternatives^[1]. Though, for completeness’ sake, openSUSE’s atomic offering continues to heavily rely on Distrobox. But, in their defense, I think their atomic offerings are simply better^[2] suited for it.

Not the one you asked, but I think the answer lies in the bold part:

most of these will make new users unhappy or even question their sanity.

For example, I can’t imagine any of the uBlue projects causing major difficulties. Though, edge cases do exist; adding kernel mods can still be a bitch, even if there are efforts to improve this.

I just thought that the phrase “the distro you are using doesn’t matter” is used to combat the analysis paralysis that many new users experience.

And -to be frank- while Ubuntu and NixOS don’t even remotely resemble each other, I can’t be the only one that feels that most traditional distros do feel kinda same~y.