Exactly! Many of the criteria included aren’t all that good for new users, and neither are the suggestions. It’s not really a good resource for experienced users either.
Well, when you get from 3 to 2000 in only a few years, the vast majority of these versions will be unusable. No wonder they had to drop everything after 11…
I wouldn’t say there’s a place to start. Once you start using programs that are configured through config files, learn about those config files in particular. Eventually, you might find that you prefer editing config files even for programs that have GUI settings - then you dive in more.
Regardless, once your config files become complex enough that you can’t quickly rewrite them if necessary, start looking for a dotfiles manager, tracking them in git, backing them up, etc…
There’s desperate need to a library that’s simpler to use than wlroots or smithay - but unless it supports more protocols (later shell, gamma control, session lock), I don’t think this is a real a alternative yet.
Do you think the use of OCI containers/images is a mistake/bad choice from blendOS?
No. It’s probably the best way to run packages from Arch, Debian. Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, all on the same system.
How is NixOS different?
NixOS simply doesn’t tackle that problem, so it doesn’t come with containers out of the box. If you want to run packages from other distros on NixOS, you’d probably need to manually configure the containers.
I feel like you’re under the impression that the three distros, NixSO, blendos, and Vanilla OS, have similar goals. I don’t know about Vanilla OS, but the main similarity between the other two is that they’re both non-standard in some way.
But they’re actually solving completely different problems: BlendOS wants to be a blend of different OSes, NixOS wants to have a reproducible, declarative configuration (declarative here means, you don’t list a bunch of steps to reach your system state, but instead declare what that state is).
Well, for playing games I use the flatpak version of steam and it works OK.
For dev work, it’s great overall. Especially its ability to create separate reproducible environments with whatever dependencies you need for every project. However, there are some tools (rare, but they exist) that don’t work well with it, and if your dev work happens to need them, it can becomes a problem.
For day to day (i.e. web browsing), it works the same as anything, with one disadvantage: there is a disadvantage here: it downloads a lot more than other distros on update, and uses more disk space. The biggest difference between NixOS, and say Arch, is not how it behaves once it’s up and running, but in how you configure it. Specifically, you have to invest a lot of time to learn how, and set up your system initially. But then reinstalls, and (some of) the maintenance, become easier.
To clarify, I was referring specifically to its ability to specify the full system configuration in its config file - not overall. But I haven’t used blendos, and my impression is mostly from a quick look at their documentation. They have a snippet with sample configuration. There, they have a “Modules” section, but I couldn’t find what modules are available, what options they have, how to configure them if we want to do something more complex than the available options.
Then containers are clearer: they have a list of installed apps, and then commands to bring them to the desired state (somewhat similar to a dockerfile). But even then, i imagine that if you have a more complex configuration, that’s going to get clunkier.
I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively. You can do that through containers, but you can do that with containers on any distro. Where it shines is declaring the complete system configuration (including installed programs and their configuration) in its config file (on file-based configuration, I wouldn’t really consider blendos a viable competitor).