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by dailykoder 452 days ago
Sounds interesting, but since I haven't been in touch much with this topic I ask myself: Does this have any benefit for my personal home-computer usage?

For a long time I have the urge to try out Nix, because I clutter up my computer way too fast and therefore often get mad and just install a fresh system. This works fine with my files, but there are always applications which I forget about and forget to save configs. So having this all in a git repo to spin it up fast would be nice. Is bootc, fedora silverblue and so forth trying to achieve something similar?

1 comments

I think bootc is exactly what you're looking for. I use it[1] for configuration like you mentioned but also for:

- Installing codecs from third-party repositories. This is especially nice to do in CI because you get a build failure if packaging drift happens.

- Installing out-of-tree drivers. Again, you get a build failure in CI if an out-of-tree kernel module won't build. In addition, you can use multi-stage builds (see the Dockerfile in my repo for an example) to avoid pulling dependencies into your final system image. This saves me from having the 70 or so RPM packages that are required for building NVIDIA drivers installed on my PC.

It's not as ambitious as NixOS but I think it gives a lot of the same benefits with far less effort.

[1]: https://github.com/averms/verms-os

Thank you! Then I'll look a bit more into it.