Image based / atomic Linux distributions experiments
, filled in linux, vanillaos, tech
I've read about image based Linux a while ago.
It seems a good idea at first sight: Android has been doing that for years and its working great.
On Android, all the applications are basically sand-boxed and application updates are managed independently from system updates.
With Flathub being now more mature, I thought about giving atomic Linux a try.
A few month ago, I went ahead and installed Fedora Silverblue.
Install went find and I could setup a reasonably complete environment easilyh
I never managed to get my Yubikey working.
Also, being a Debian user for more than twenty years, I felt a bit lost in that Fedora based distribution.
So I abandoned the atomic distribution thing and went back to a classic Debian based distribution.
Fast-forward to today where I'm writing this on a VanillaOS installation.
It's atomic and Debian based, using snapshot of Debian Sid as basis.
I'm still getting used to it but it feels way more like home in here.
I find The documentation is a bit sparse, the handbooks are helping but they lack a bit in depth.
I needed to learn how to add packages to the main system overlay.
Also, everything is became simpler once I understood the VSO shell concept.
It's basically a Distrobox based container with some helper to tie them into the environment.
The shell is started in that container by default.
You can use host-shell in case you need to run some command in the system's shell.
I installed some applications as flatpaks (some of them are setup by the VanillaOS installer at install time): Firefox, Slack, Zoom, LibreOffice...
Emacs wouldn't work so well as a flatpak as it needs to interact with lots of external tools so I installed it in the VSO shell, along with the tools I use for development.
For day to day use, it feels more or less like Debian until you need to mess with the lower level system.
We'll see if I manage to stay around.