That sounds a bit funny, when those technologies are just (despite me not liking to use this term) inferior

Perhaps I should have worded that better 😅. It was meant as a textbook example of status quo bias; anything found by default on a ‘product’ that’s deliberately opinionated will see its audience gravitate towards said defaults. Even if those defaults are inferior to other options.

So, in this case, uBlue initially had a script within ujust (or just) that installed the Nix package manager. It wasn’t necessarily the perfect fit, but it definitely had its use cases:

• Installation of CLI software was better handled by Nix than the alternatives (read: either Toolbx/Distrobox or layering with rpm-ostree)
• Flatpak was even more restricted than today. So Nix offered an additional avenue for installing GUI software without layering.
• The nixpkgs repository supersedes even Fedora’s own repositories in terms of available packages, effectively making it their atomic AUR.

But then, not long after the troubling conflicts between Nix and SELinux, brew was inaugurated as the de facto alternative for CLI and the rest is history.

in terms of packaging, only flatpak really shines because of its embedded permission model

Yup, can’t agree more.

Yeah, I think you should at least give it a shot and see how you like it, it’s not as easy right out of the box as the other 2 you mentioned, of course, so you should find out for yourself what you feel more comfortable using.

FWIW, I have actually used Nix sparingly in the past. IIRC, it broke on me at some point 😅. That could be on me, though. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the details. It could also be related to the hardening found on secureblue.

I agree 😜.

lol. I initially had a better written reply that I was about to send, but I clicked on cancel instead of reply. RIP.

First of all, thank you for sharing your own experiences!

Secondly, in short, looking at the discord servers that are related to the uBlue project, general folk seem to have moved past Nix and use flatpak and brew instead for GUI and CLI respectively. Though, some community members happily report to be content with Nix. So, perhaps I shouldn’t be necessarily opposed to home-manager.

Finally, I didn’t expect to find a crossover between brew and chezmoi to effectively become a quasi-home-manager.

Honestly, you could be absolutely right. I haven’t revisited Nix since Bazzite Buzz #12 informed us on the following:

“The Nix ujust script has also been removed due to conflicts with SELinux policies. Users can still install the Nix package manager manually if they so desire at their own risk.”

However, the above could be outdated; I simply don’t know. Are you aware of any developments that have changed things for the better?

So, the basic premise of the impermanence module is to flush all state on (re)boot. By default, NixOS is already capable of rebuilding your entire system from the config file(s). The impermanence module simply aids in achieving the desired system workflow for no state without reinventing the wheel. In effect, It’s as if you’ve just done a reinstall and setup everything as you like. But you get to experience this on every reboot. For someone that’s perpetually disturbed by state, which has been the case since my Windows-days*, this would finally grant me a peace of mind that I’ve been yearning for years. So, to answer your question, it would help me get (at least one step) closer to stateless Fedora Atomic without giving up general usability.

You would have been right if the entire filesystem were to be immutable. However, for Fedora Atomic, /var and /etc are writable. Thankfully so, as most people wouldn’t want a totally locked down operating system. Heck, no general-purpose distro (or OS otherwise) tries to achieve that level of immutability by default.