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I just got into Silverblue (also love Nix), and I really feel that it's the way Linux "should be". I say this as a Linux user since 1999. If you haven't checked it out, imagine that the base (read-only) operating system (drivers, etc) changes in a very controlled and atomic fashion while all your userland stuff is updated via Flatpak (or Distrobox, etc). The odds of breaking your system are virtually zero, and everything works out of the box. It's amazing.

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This is similar to the experience (if not so similar on the implementation side) of running MacOS with Homebrew or Macports: the stuff you directly use stays up-to-date, but the base system is separate so it’s nigh-impossible to mess anything important up just by updating your user-facing packages. You also don’t have to choose between stable-but-old and unstable-and-new—the base OS (including gui!) is stable, the stuff you use can be new, because the two are barely coupled at all.

It’s a lot closer to the right way to manage this stuff, for desktop systems, than traditional Linux package management approaches. That approach is painful to go back to, after getting used to this. I’ll have to give this a try next time I poke my head into Linux-land.

Does Silverblue have the same plaintext system configuration capabilities like NixOS?

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