Jorge Castro has been the head of this project and I am excited by his vision. Bluefin aims to be the immutable desktop distro with the most sane defaults that also supports Nvidia.
It's a mascot for brand recognition purposes, just like Tux the penguin. I don't quite understand what the problem is. I feel like if I were to call anything about it weird, it would be the use of a derpy, chonky dinosaur rather than the gender of said derpasaurus.
If you are a modder that wants to do stuff like replace the kernel, add in rust coreutils etc, then I think NixOS is indeed better. Have not used it but really want to try.
Image based Distros are just perfect for people that want to have perfectly reproducible bugs, or in general not many.
It is a good community concept, but tbh a preset of shared Nix config files could do the same thing too, with ease. Just dont deviate from those configs and you will have multiple people with the same systems.
Exactly. The concept is great, but my Guix system (Nix fork from GNU) is already reproducible and capable of rollbacks and transactional upgrades (and declarative system configuration !)
The learning curve is quite steep tho (the Nix leaning curve is even higher, at least it used to be IMO). If the sway spin of Atomic Fedora was available earlier I probably wouldn't have switched tbh. Both solutions are great.
Overall I'm quite happy with my Guix configuration. I've got roughly the same configuration on all my systems with ease, all config files (also sway for example) in the same language: Guile Scheme (LISP dialect), and the whole thing is in git. I don't imagine going back to a regular distribution anytime soon.
Damn, rust really embrace the "Hey, Can I copy your homework?" Meme. I like rust btw, it's just funny how often I see something along the line of "it's like X, but in rust!"
Agreed. I used to use Silverblue and it was very stable but did not solve all the problems that Nix addresses. Once you experience the first reinstall with NixOS you will wonder why we did things any other way. It's amazing to just run one command and have things set up exactly how you like.
I like them a lot, switched to Kinoite⏩uBlue: (Kinoite-main, -nokmods (until that got silently dropped), -main again; 37-39)⏩Secureblue kinoite-laptop-userns
The biggest Problem is that Fedoras Images are not usable.
Filemanager movie thumbnails dont work
Flatpak browsers are not feature-complete and probably not secure (because they can't create usernamespace-isolated processes for tabs)
they have no NVIDIA support
powerusers will miss ffmpeg
The idea of immutable images is, to have a base that most people dont need to change. You can, but the moment you add NVIDIA proprietary drivers or full ffmpeg, you are in unprotected territory again.
So I like the Distros for their reproducible bugs and future possibility to be a very secure base (you could just verify the hash of the root system to check for viruses). But they cannot be produced in the US.
Fedora is nice but just like with rpmfusion, ublue is the key part that makes it work. And on immutable images this cannot just be added in a welcome dialog, as you need massive overrides by default.
I can't find an open issue regarding security with flatpaks on librewolf https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues it would be nice if you could open one such that it may get adressed.
Just install ffmpeg in a distrobox or layer it if you desire
Filemanager thumbnails - I usually don't use big icons (or thumbnails) hence, I don't remember it too well but that should depend on the file manager, right? And aren't there tools for thumbnail creation in case they are missing? (I remember something from my time when I used arch)
Chromium uses namespaces. Nowadays unprivileged user namespaces, but the legacy suid namespaces are still integrated.
If you want to run Chromium (and I think all Electron apps too) as Flatpak, you replace those namespaces with zypak, which instead isolates processes using flatpak and its seccomp filters.
These are the seccomp filters for every app though, so they are probably way too unrestricted. Also it has a small performance hit.
That is the reason why no Chromium Browser Flatpak is official.
Now the thing with Firefox is, I have no idea what isolation they use. Everyone says its less secure. And they adopted Flatpak as if it was nothing, without any comment on that topic.
The issue is that Flatpak uses a single seccomp filter for bubblewrap, that is used by every app. But browsers would need a different one, with just the added permission to create user namespaces.
Currently this is not even possible when using a seperate repo. Really, no idea. Bubblejail is an alternative with custom seccomp filters and usernamespace permission. But it is very different, uses system packages and is very alpha.
You cant layer ffmpeg, you need to override-remove everything libav and then install everything new from rpmfusion. I did that, its a mess.
If you just want video playback thats just libavcodec-freeworld, thats why I specifically mentioned ffmpeg.
I am not a fan of Distrobox for small tools. For sure possible but unnecessary and the workflow is a pain. And trust me, I use it daily and even ran libvirt in a rootful one, virt-manager in a rootless one, connected over ssh.