I just wanted another folder at /

where i get into trouble is when i do a bunch of nixos-rebuild —switches between restarts and some state ends up hanging around, so next time i do a reboot that ephemeral state is gone and whoops no internet

Its the ghost, the ghost in the machine. Major Kusanagi would be proud
If you’re not already, just erase your darlings.
Then you can preview what files are lost on reboot (see blogpost).
- That was a really good read, thanks for the link!
Not specifically a nixos issue, also at least nix gives you rollbacks

I just don't get these for a bare metal system. Containers? Sounds great. Definitely on board. Bare metal? Debian, standard fedora, or gentoo is what makes sense to me

Workstation-as-code is pretty dope for enterprise...
The idea of an immutable, idempotent, declarative workstation, from cradle to grave, tickles me pink.
- At that point, make it a thin client which boots from a network image and logs you into a terminal server.
  Then you have the hardware and software resources you need for your role wherever you are.
- So... containers that people log into...? Falls under containers
Fedora Atomic has been working nicely on my personal laptop. Anything funky, I tend to run in a VM w/ libvirt (KVM/QEMU) or a container. Makes it quicker to fix if I break something.

Some updates after sleeping on it and trying some morning debugging:

It's actually either service being enabled that prevents login
It's a gnome-shell issue. Logging into a tty is fine, and shows that it's gnome-shell crashing when trying to log-in normally

Maybe it's time to go back to debian...

Debian hasn't done me dirty yet
Maybe it's time to join us in NixOS land. When you have the immutability on top of the whole OS and the language controlling it, things tend to work a bit better.
I'm Sorry we don't have the "))))))". Just a weird ass language.
I had this with a sunshine service being added as a user service in bazzite. I created a clean new user and it booted, confirming it was user based. Took a bunch of binary searching to work out what the issue was.
I've since done my own autostart setup for sunshine and it's been fine ever since.
Crappy UX!
- Yeah, thinking I might have to do something similar to start the services after login. Unfortunately they need to run as root, so it'll be tricky to avoid having a second password prompt every time I login

Wait, what? I’m legit not familiar with immutable distros, is it like you’re only allowed to modify certain directories?

In simplified terms:
You are allowed to modify stuff but it is not actually changing the install as is.
This is achieved by different techniques like file system overlays, containerisation, btrfs snapshots and so on.
The idea is to replicate the classical behavior you know from embedded devices that have their core functionality in ROM with even firmware updates only overlayed or modern smartphones: You can modify your system but in the end there's always the possibilty to "reset to factory settings" as in: the last known working configuration.
- So, baby-proofing Linux?
Kinda. Generally the user files (including custom installed applications) are on a rw partition. Whereas the system files (OS files, root folder, etc) are on a ro partition. When updates are applied to the core system they come as complete images. No compiling from source on the fly.
The advantages to this is that it should be near impossible to break your system. If you need to roll back to a previous version the system just/downloads/mounts the previous image. There is less flexibility in terms of changing system files. But the idea with immutable distros is that you shouldn't be modifying system files anyways, and there are different ways to accomplish things.
A really good example is Android. Android (non-rooted) is kinda-sorta an immutable distro. Except it uses an A/B partition method, where the active system downloads and installs to the other partition, triggers a flag, then a reboot picks up the flag and boots from the newly installed partition. If anything goes wrong, another flag is triggered and it boots from the "good" partition.
It's not quite the same, but at a high-level it kinda is.
Edit: article I found about it
https://linuxblog.io/immutable-linux-distros-are-they-right-for-you-take-the-test/
Yes, kind of.
Someone might correct me if I’m wrong but it’s that, plus extra tooling to redirect the stuff that needs to be writable, plus more extra tooling to allow you to temporarily unlock the read-only parts in order to do system updates, plus a system updater that puts the whole system more-or-less under version control.

It feel like so long since I've seen someone use this template correctly, so you've got that going for you 👍

I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.

Install as much as possible via flatpak
Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)

That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.

Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though... so... not sure how much benefit I'm really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That's something...

Byebye to your storage 😆