I am running Bluefin immutable distro and I would like to test Niri. I found on the net that the cleanest way is to use systemd-sysext and I have managed to install Niri using the community extensions.
Now I would like to install Dank Material Shell, and it has a couple of pre-requisites and I am clueless how I can add them again with systemd-sysext.
I tried to look for additional information, but found very little on the matter. Do any of you have experience with this?
It’s not how you “generally” do it because many immutable distro developers keep developing additional ways to do package management that are more and more complicated.
I still don’t get why we can’t have a BSD like approach. Make usr, bin, sbin read-only. But have /usr/local be writable and have a traditional package manager install to that location instead.
Bluefin maintainer here, you’ve described how Bluefin works except it’s ~/.local/bin.
I am pretty sure we have not been developing package managers lol.
I think that’s because the user can still fuck up their system by doing some stuff to those user files, like not managing their packages correctly. Note that for normal users anything that messes up their user experience equates to messing up “the system”. But I don’t really know, it’s just a guess. I just run a normal distro where you can mess with everything (like god intended lol).
That’s not the reason. On immutable distros, you can still mess up your flatpak packages, distrobox containers, homebrew packages, etc.
Only “OS” files like those in /bin prevent accidental modification and removal since you cannot directly change them, even with root.
wait: there’s immutable versions of macos?
MacOS’s has been immutable for a while now. But that’s not what I was referring to. Homebrew also works on Linux, lots of CLI tools and libraries are available there. It does have some GUI apps, but not as many packaged as for MacOS.
i was aware that homebrew works on linux, i just assumed people would use apt/dnf/guix/whatever since it seems superior to me; but then again, i hardly ever touch homebrew besides my employer provided mac.
what applications does immutable macos have?
We are discussing immutable distros, where you don’t have apt/dnf/guix/whatever installed on the host system. They are replaced with other package managers. On Ubuntu Core, that is snap. On Fedora Atomic, that is rpm-ostree, flatpak, and toolbox.
MacOS is immutable, there is no non-immutable version.