Containers made a huge impact on my workflow, and I consider them just a way to ease packaging. Nothing else; all the other considerations of software must still be considered.

With NixOS and GuixSD you have easy to deploy, easy to update immutable systems with IaC built-in and no containers at all...

They can be used also for development create isolated FHS environments with a simple text file describe the environment, again without containers.

That's one of the reason I consider them the future, you have:

- built-in infrastructure as code

- built-in immutable servers

- built-in orchestration/provisioning

All with human-readable, easy to manage, text files.

IMO Nix code is the exact opposite of easy to read and usable. I used it on my headless box at home for a couple of years and really liked the concept, but the syntax is just way too hard to use IMO. I'd like to take a look at using guix as the lisp syntax I think is much easier to grok.

Yep, that's why I second to try GuixSD but for now GuixSD is really raw&limited compared to NixOS... And nix itself while in some case it's not much clear for most usage is clear enough...

You should look into Darch.

https://godarch.com/

"Think Dockerfiles, but for bootable, immutable, stateless, graphical (or not) environments for your everyday usage"

It supports Arch/Debian/Ubuntu/VoidLinux.

Almost any Linux distribution can do that. Why I should chose an obscure distribution instead of major one, like Fedora?

Tell me how... Saltstack/Ansible on top of traditional distro is a small car compared to a spaceship...

BTW NixOS, repology at hand, offer the most up to date and big package set, second only to Arch AUR... Fedora and Ubuntu are far behind. Not so "obscure" IMO...

Repology is slightly misleading here.

NixOS includes packages for multiple Python versions, as well as a large fraction of PyPi multiplied by the number of Python versions on which they run, and Repology counts all of them despite these being basically the same package.

It's still a large package set even accounting for that, but it's not that large.

That's true but also that's means that you can tweak your environment with nix, for instance if you develop in python, while on Ubuntu/Fedora you have to go by hand/pip etc. It's IMO a plus, even if it's "hard to say they are independent pkgs".

I can also add few Gnome Shell extensions, Emacs packages and Vim plugins etc. They may "count less" but when you build your system, for instance via homeManager they count.

Having switched off Ubuntu when Canonical decide to leave desktop (because yes abandon Unity7 means leave desktop, and adding 10+year support to latest LTS means the same) I found a far more up to date system with a bigger package selection than Ubuntu, plus all the advantage of a functional OS (replication, never-brake updates, major distro version included etc)...

I can't really measure accurately nor package coverage nor popularity but I found NixOS all but certainly not an obscure distro... For GuixSD I'm a bit less happy since while I like scheme vs nix, I like Emacs integration and Emacs related packages it really suffer from having too few devs. But not NixOS. NixOS IMO is production-ready and a good choice other RH/Ubuntu for server usage...

> I agree but in containers' defense they weren't supposed to be about security in the first place.

> In my understanding the main incentive for the huge push behind them was immutability and them being microservices-friendly technology.

I'm not a container historian, but I believe this came later: when Docker and the like entered the scene with their ideas of immutability, LXC on Linux was already several years old, and BSD Jails / Solaris Zones probably a decade older still; and they were all quite mutable.

When I first came across them, I viewed them as very lightweight VMs, with (as you say) rather insufficient security, but still useful for experiments or to segregate services for ease of management.

I wholeheartedly agree with this endeavor. Traditional packaging is so messy with a unified tree. We have claimed a lot of ground toward immutable systems. I totally love how easy it has become to scale horizontally in hardware and add virtual nodes to extend containers into.

You should look into Darch.

https://godarch.com/

"Think Dockerfiles, but for bootable, immutable, stateless, graphical (or not) environments for your everyday usage"

It supports Arch/Debian/Ubuntu/VoidLinux.

You are confusing packaging, orchestration and virtualization.

Take a look at NixOS then :-)