In my experience, the most innovative distributions include NixOS and GNU Guix System (Nix influenced it): determinism/correctness, pure functional paradigm, declarative, atomic, departing from FHS for good, … And they are pretty useful currently: Nix has the most packages, both are declarative so can easily reuse the configuration and apply in infrastructure as code, can rollback, can use for development (basically a way better alternative to Docker), can use in other distributions and Nix even on MacOS… Nix community being generally more practical, agile and flexible, while the GNU Guix community enforcing more correctness (building everything in their repositories from source including all transitive dependencies) and software freedom as GNU/FSF defines.

Other distributions I could include are musl based ones, Clear Linux, Fedora SIlverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and projects like sel4, Theseus OS, but I don’t have much experience with them to describe them fairly. So please lets discourse about innovative distributions and operating systems, those which you have experienced, which you may be excited about.

  • @gcb
    1•2 years ago

    nix is a meme.

    there will never be a solution to system adm other than understanding the damn thing.

    nix et all are js dev playing distro maintainers to other js devs. have this pile of hacks that will work until next minor version update. and pray nothing like systed happens in your lifetime.

    pick arch or free/openbsd unless you want to be a professional sysadm. and use kata if want disposable deterministic things that will only work for 5 or so years.

    • @hfkldjbuq@beehaw.orgOP
      1•2 years ago

      Unix sucks. Containrers suck very much too. Nix community is trying to make it suck less; they are pretty good at that taking into account the limited amount of contributors.

      I’ll take a look at Kata, thanks for the info

      • @gcb
        1•2 years ago

        unix is about jugling processes on top of a kernel.

        processes are just fancy processes.

        kata/firecracker/qemu/xen are virtualization/vms they are the only thing that differ from unix, but so far by just adding a new layer to more unix.

        nix is a meme because it pretend to be something else than a package manager with shared settings for a very subset of things. its basically an opinionated distro, but with dangerous illusion of grandeur.

        • @hfkldjbuq@beehaw.orgOP
          2•2 years ago

          nix is a meme because it pretend to be something else than a package manager with shared settings for a very subset of things.

          Nix the package manager, and NixOS the operating system are different things. Nix does not pretends to be something else than a better package manager / build system for deterministic/reproducible distribution of software.

          And by Unix I meant beyond processes… I meant all the imperative way of doing things in Unix and Unix-like OSs. Problematic FHS… I.e things that Nix and NixOS solve.

          • @gcb
            1•1 year ago

            will read more on nixos then.

            looked a long time ago and the selling point was just calling the common practice of a install-script black magic. …yeah install scripts are not standardized across distros, but they did start one from scratch too so :shrug and while that is nice, dockerfiles are more popular now, for better or worse (it’s for worse)

            what i call a meme is all the promises that config sharing fixes all problems. yeah you can share your facy declarative build setting with 7tb of ram and running all compilers as root to rebuild your package, but i won’t touch it on my systems.

            rest all seemed pretty unixy underneath.

      • Sandra
        1•2 years ago

        I agree; Nix is better than containers. You can also run just nix-shell instead of installing Nix as a full distro.