Rubber duck helps me debug my daily driver issues

ME: I love Fedora, but I don’t like having to do updates and reboot more than once a week. If only there was a Debian-like LTS for Fedora …

RUBBER DUCK: There kinda is. You could install Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, or CentOS Stream and use one of those as your daily driver. I mean, you use Nix as a package manager anyway, so it’s not like you’ll miss anything from the Fedora repos.

ME: Oh, uh, you might actually be onto something there, Rubber duck. But the idea of using an enterprise server-oriented distro as my daily driver? That … that doesn’t quite sit right with me.

RUBBER DUCK: Well, you could also try Fedora Kinoite. It’s rock-solid, and you would only have to run rpm-ostree update once a week. You could setup a basic toolbox container with Distrobox and install the Nix package manager via the daemon-less single-user method. The toolbox container could even be Debian stable.

ME: Yeah 🤔. That does sound very appealing. And I wouldn’t mind using the latest Fedora as a toolbox container; it’s mostly when running updates requires a reboot because the kernel and core system libraries were updated. With the toolbox container, at most I would just have to restart the container. For other graphical applications, I could either use flatpaks or install them with Nix and configure update-desktop-database to search for them in my Nix profile. There is really no hard reason I need to do anything important outside the mutable parts of the filesystem. Aside from the /home directory, /etc and /usr/local are also mutable.

RUBBER DUCK: Yep. Also, if you’re going the immutable-ish route, you might as well just use NixOS, then, no?

ME: Yeah, I’ve tried that before, but the filesystem and userspace just felt … I dunno … weird. And using the Nix language for anything other than development environments and home directory configuration feels rather … I dunno … weird. And I’d rather not get lost in the labyrinth of a Nix flakes rabbit hole. It just seems needlessly complicated for little benefit, to me. My goal is to find something and stick with it consistently, and have it be my daily driver, the same way my physical desk is just here, and reliable, and low-maintenance. I want to avoid wasting time fussing about with my NixOS configuration.

RUBBER DUCK: Fair enough, I hear you.

ME: Anyway, I think I know what I want now. Thanks for the chat, Rubber duck!