I’ve got a refurb laptop coming to me soon and I’ve been wanting to mess with immutable distros for a while… I have no idea what sort of specs the laptop has.

Anyone have any opinions on good immutable distro(s) to try out and why?

Only distros on my list so far are Bluefin and Vanilla (Gnome isn’t a favorite these days though).

  • ultimate_worrier@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    7 days ago

    NixOS is surely what I’d recommend.

    I like to tinker with an Arch Linux install using a VM to iterate quickly then translate almost ALL of the home dotfiles and preferences to deterministic nix code that absolutely LOCKS everything into place.

    Some essential features/projects to incorporate into a decent nix config:

    • nix flakes
    • home-manager
    • content-addressed and dynamic derivations (Eelco’s original paper writes about CA derivations as the holy grail)
    • cachix (local cache) and community substituters
    • forgejo (local forge with local CI to test nix flake updates for breakage and warm the local cache) I call it my “update canary”)
    • nixos-anywhere/netboot/initrd boot scripting influenced by NixOS-anywhere but extended
    • disko
    • impermanance (lots of work up front declaring what persists between boots but this one is ESSENTIAL. This module makes it virtually impossible for a compromised package or virus to survive a reboot if things are done right.)
    • sops-nix
    • nixos-needs-reboot
    • devenv/direnv