jerb

This is still fully possible on Immutable distros (which is why the name is misleading, but unfortunately is what stuck- “image-based” is a better description) and uBlue has a mechanism for it- since they’re delivered using OCI containers, it’s trivial to fork or derive from the project and add, remove or tweak whatever you need. There’s also BlueBuild which is YAML but that’s a third party project.

Wasn’t aware they were integrating docker-compose, that’s the perfect solution. I got so fed up with TrueCharts that I’ve been considering nuking my NAS and reinstalling OMV or something similar, but I guess I’ll wait it out and see what happens.

Seconding this. TrueCharts has been an absolute pain and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

Just the kernel module, which still interacts with the proprietary driver.

That app just looks like reskinned KDE Connect.

https://github.com/htrefil/rkvm

Not particularly, the workflow on your Arch system will be the same as any other distro, that’s the nice thing about Distrobox.

I would highly recommend looking into the distrobox-assemble command, though: it lets you declaratively build distroboxes with the packages and config you need on them. I have a personal box which operates as my primary terminal that’s automatically destroyed and recreated on every boot. This way, the packages I always use in a terminal are available, and I can add something I need temporarily with no issue without worrying about forgetting about that package being there down the line and causing some weird update failure or general bloat.

It does take some adjusting- the pitfalls you’d encounter with Distrobox on Universal Blue are the same as Distrobox on any other distro, so first I’d say to try moving your workflow to Flatpak and Distrobox on your current system or a VM and see how it works out. Generally Flatpak is preferred to a rootless Distrobox which is preferred to a rootful one, but sometimes there’s not a Flatpak for something (especially command line tools) and you need access to hardware or system level stuff that only a rootful one can do properly.

I think there’s still value in it from being a DE-agnostic GUI solution, for what it’s worth.

Isn’t Endless immutable?

I can agree with this, my Darter has horrendous battery life and had a ton of bugs that made the thing really annoying to use until a recent BIOS update. I can’t help but feel like I got burned.

Next laptop is a Framework for sure.

Fully agreed- I experimented with it around November of last year and absolutely love the idea of it, but the documentation just isn’t there. At the time I found nothing explaining flakes in a clear and concise manner so I had no idea how to use them or add them into my configs. People online kept saying to port the rest of my configuration to flakes but all of the examples online were complex and there was no simple example to build off of. I ended up settling for Universal Blue since it just uses OCI containers and I don’t need a PhD to have a pseudo-declarative environment in it, but would love to revisit NixOS if the documentation ever gets better.