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Comparison between NixOS vs blendOS vs Vanilla OS: what to pick and why?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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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).
Sorry for my ignorance,
but why is blendOS not a viable competitor to NixOS?
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.
Thanks, that makes sense.
Do you think the use of OCI containers/images is a mistake/bad choice from blendOS?
How is NixOS different?
No. It's probably the best way to run packages from Arch, Debian. Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, all on the same system.
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).