I am playing around with Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon and I really like the painless updates.
Still, my daily driver for some years now is Debian, and I have a decent setup via Ansible - everything just works for me.
My question is mostly to long term Linux users, which use Linux in a professional context and jumped from a distribution like Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE or Debian to NixOS, Silverblue, Aeon etc.
What is your experience? How did your workflows change on your immutable Linux distribution? Did you try immutable and went back to a more traditional distribution - why? How long are you running the immutable distribution and what issues and perks did you run into?
yep…same here.
Also, I use VSCode which incorporates all the toolings that I have installed and also frequently use in a terminal. For an immutable system, I’d have to use the Flatpak version of VScode, which cannot access these toolings from the host.
So, no immutability for me now.
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Also, on nixos you don’t have to do that if you are lazy and can just install dependencies in your global config. Yeah its less optimal, but I’m too lazy to make flake files for each project.
When you say “with the project”… you mean, you load up a typescript project, so you can use npm, etc. but you cannot use golang toolings within that same VScode window, and vice versa?
His config loads npm and stuff when he is in the project directory. So anywhere outside of that directory, its like its not installed.
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Lol… as someone who jumps around between toolings all the time, this is anything but “flexible” for me.
I might write an app that uses web tech for the frontend and golang for the backend, and suddenly decide to throw in a flutter version for mobile.
But if it works for you, great.
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It’s all good, man. I’m not saying that my way is the right way, and your’s is wrong, and I love being educated.
What I mean, is, I have all the toolings already there without having to set them up, once I feel I need them.
So the discussion is more about having things set up globally vs. scoped.
NixOS is hard to explain.
I also did not get it at first, but got into a 101 session at cfgmgmtcamp last year and then it clicked.
I would suggest looking at YouTube videos like this one and try to understand what NixOS really is.
It is a pity really that it is not more approachable, the project would have more success if it is somehow easier to explain to others that are new to it :).
You can actually use distrobox to set up a regular version of Fedora, set up VSCode there using the official Microsoft RPM and keep all your code in there.
I know, but then again… it’s just another layer of maintenance.
Don’t get me wrong. Distrobox is a wonderful piece of software. I use Arch inside DB to run some non-crucial stuff that’s not available in the fedora repos/copr, like lycheeslicer.
But having a working and reliable code environment is something I’d really not want to babysit.
Yeah I’ve run into the same problems, really annoying when I can’t find a workaround but it’s getting easier as time goes on