Post #1440328

2026-04-19 21:42 UTC

Not sure how I feel about this “distroless” pattern. It’s interesting to be able to get components directly from upstreams from like Gnome, but it makes certain tasks more difficult. The lack of any distro packages to fall back on when flatpak, distrobox, appimages, and brew fails is simply annoying. I’ve experienced this multiple times. When I would flash OSes on my Pixel, I couldn’t use flatpak/distrobox/brew. I would either have to (1) overlay a browser and ADB tools, (2) overlay ADB and maybe use an Appimage browser, or (3) boot into a traditional distro like Debian that has an unrestricted browser. Distroless has no recourse for me here. Using sshfs: installing sshfs from brew or distrobox would not work without host configuration changes made by overlaying sshfs. Distroless has no distro package to fall back on Using tailscale: tailscale from brew didn’t work. Had to fall back on distro package. Distroless would fail me here, but in this case, I believe Jorge preinstalls it. So simply adopt all of Jorge’s tastes and applications and you’ll be fine… No upstream Steam support since there’s no rpmfusion or official valve package to use, you’d have to use something like the unoffical Steam flatpak While I love Fedora Atomic and atomic distros in general, I constantly feel like they do not think things through. They made the system harder to break, but with severely limited (if you use them the way you’re encouraged to, like no layering). They then address these gaps one by one with more and more solutions that are imperfect and that do not fit all needs. Flatpak is good for GUI apps, but not CLI. Brew is good for CLI stuff, but does funky PATH things that could break host OS at times (and as mentioned, did not work for sshfs or tailscale for me). KDE Linux initially promoted Brew, but then later recommended not using it at all due to its PATH shenanigans Distrobox is good if you need distro packages, but the containerization has limitations with desktop integration and more complex tasks, like I mentioned with flashing OSes on my Pixel. At least with Fedora Atomic (and containerfiles with bootc stuff), I can get a robust system, seamless OS upgrades, and install any packages that do not work well as flatpaks/distrobox/appimages.

Replies (6)

@brnaftreadn@lemmy.world 2026-04-19 22:10

I’ve never tried these “distroless” systems before. Curious about these setups. Have you tried nix pkg manager in place of brew?

Open ##1440477
@marlowe221@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 02:43

I have also been a Bluefin user for a while now… Could you say more about the PATH issues with brew? Or point me to where I can learn more about them? I was kind of enjoying brew for installing development tools, and was thinking about adopting it on my non-atomic machines too. Should I not do that?

Open ##1440905
@TaintTaul@programming.dev 2026-04-20 22:38

no layering I foresee a future in which (so-called) sysexts will be used heavily to address the resulting gaping hole. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect either… Though, I have to say that I find it quite hilarious to see how many alternative package managers are required to replace traditional package managers.

Open ##1466179
@Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-04-20 17:47

There’s probably a combination of magic command line flags that allows podman/distrobox to work, but we honestly shouldn’t need containers for this at all. It’s frustrating how we have all the pieces to make this work, but they just don’t come together properly: Brew isn’t sandboxed and pollutes the environment Nix isn’t sandboxed and can’t prefix install (also the DX with Nix really sucks) Guix is like Nix but without the packages Flatpak doesn’t have the packages Snap is proprietary garbage Maybe this is a hint that I should write my own package manager, with blackjack and hookers that works like Nix but doesn’t hardcode /nix/store and runs everything in bubblewrap?

Open ##1472661
@jaxxed@lemmy.world 2026-04-21 04:19

We should note that it is super easy to extend a bootc release, and use dnf to install additional packages. It is a docker/podman contanerfile of a few lines. I have a github repo that adds virtmanager and ghostty to the excellent zirconium release, rebuilds ever day - and then uupd pulls the update every day. The atomics are not meant to limit you, they are meant to free you to get what you want, usng simple oci tools. Another great thing is being able to swap distros with simple commands. I installed bluefin, then swapped to zircnium to get niri and dms.

Open ##1480612
@floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-21 06:22

"Distroless" sounds hip and innovative, "a distro without a package manager" doesn't

Open ##2176100