Now that I've finished the first draft of an article on setting up rootless Podman on Guix System, I'm using and building out a set of tools to support a new article covering an all Red Hat stack from inner loop to CI.

So far, it's

• OpenShift for the platform services run on
• Podman for my local container engine
• Podman Compose for inner loop development
• OpenShift Pipelines for CI
• Shipwright for building container images locally with Buildah
• Quay for image scanning and storage
• OpenShift Serverless for scale-to-zero deployments

Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, "cruft" accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as "immutable". Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don't leave the system in an inconsistent state.

What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

Is that helpful at all? There's also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.

Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that's a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.

That's very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally "pure": no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That's a Dev Container.

It should be harder to support Docker, which hasn't released a new open source product since before Docker Desktop, which is also proprietary. Podman Desktop? OSS. It'd be hard to name a product Red Hat supports that isn't OSS.

Can't believe I'm the first one to come in with Guix System!! I like it because, just like NixOS, it's immutable, declarative and pure. I also dig that everything is written in Guile Scheme, a full-fat programming language. You don't need to know the language exhaustively to get started. There's some wonderful folks in the community though it's a bit spread out since not everyone wants to chat on IRC and mailing lists.

The Guix sublemmy.

Sorry, I should have clarified: Bluetooth or USB-connected trackpad. I use a fancy mechanical keyboard so I need some other input device that isn't my laptop's integrated trackpad.

Come over to team Guix System, we have cookies 🍪

I'm very sad I paid for a Fold and don't get 7 years of updates.

My employer, garden.io, offers pipelines you can run anywhere: in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, locally, wherever! We capture all your dependencies in a dependency graph, then cache all your inputs: builds, tests, run scripts. We're open source at https://github.com/garden-io/garden

Racket but I'll take Guile Scheme as a close second. Then Hy, a lisp dialect of Python. I'm writing a blog written in a DSL of Racket right now, Pollen, that makes authoring a joyful experience. Hy gives me access to the entire Python ecosystem plus access to things like macros. Guile Scheme is the configuration language of the Linux distribution, Guix System. Guile's G-Expressions are so powerful for writing packages.

I use and love Telegram. I use almost all of its features. All of its clients are open source. It has an incredible API for writing bots (which I also do). Their desktop Linux app is native! When I'm traveling I use Stories to share the experience with friends and family. I love the new topics to separate group discussions. It's the one app I've been able to onboard absolutely everyone to. I was never able to do the same when I tried to with Matrix and you only get so many chances before people stop moving.

What is crufty garbage to you?

In the spirit of answering a question of genuine interest, it's because tabs are much easier to process out on desktop, whether to read-it-later archives like Pocket or Omnivore or to project folders or tasks. I'd just sync them up and call it a day but I lost my moment when my tabs crept up over one hundred. There's a lot of good research there, whether for work or home programming projects.