71 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
71 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
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# Checking out blendOS
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blendOS is self-described as "Arch Linux, made declarative, immutable and atomic." And yeah, that's a pretty good description of what it is. But you can never *really* tell what a distro is like without trying it, so...
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## Installation
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I decided to just run blendOS in a virtual machine; I had a bunch of data I hadn't backed up yet and was actively working on, and didn't feeling like switching yet given I had no experience with blendOS v4[^1] - I've actually tried blendOS v3 before, back when v4 was in alpha, but it had practically zero documentation, not even `man` pages, so I gave up on it very quickly. But with v4, hopefully it's improved since then.
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## First use
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Upon first boot, blendOS drops you into a pretty standard GNOME session, on account of the `/system.yaml` file by default:
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```yaml
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impl: http://github.com/blend-os/tracks/raw/main
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repo: https://pkg-repo.blendos.co
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track: default-gnome
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```
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At first I wasn't sure what impl is doing, but it seems to be combined with the track to get the URL for the raw `yaml` file[^1].
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This is actually a really interesting bit *which isn't documented*, as it means you can just, say, host your own track(s) for all your computers in a Git repo, and they can each inherit from other configs[^2] or be overridden locally; this actually seems like a very interesting and viable way to centrally manage many computers running Linux, and given I'm constantly switching between several computers; I can just put my config(s) in one repo, and pull from that.
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## Configuration
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blendOS's configuration is really simple:
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```yaml
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impl: http://github.com/blend-os/tracks/raw/main
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repo: https://pkg-repo.blendos.co
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track: default-gnome
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arch-repo: 'https://repo-goes-here.example'
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packages:
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- 'fish'
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aur-packages:
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- 'EVEN-MORE-FISH'
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services:
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- 'service-goes-here'
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user-services:
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- 'user-service-goes-here'
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package-repos:
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- name: 'repo name'
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repo-url: 'https://repo.url'
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commands:
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'echo hiiiiiii > /home/user/helloooooo'
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```
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It's quite basic, but blendOS actually works very well for me; I already have a Git repo of [all my configs](https://git.askiiart.net/askiiart/configs), which are intended to be run from a clean installation automatically, so for blendOS I just have to put those scripts into the yaml file and adapt it so the packages are listed in the YAML rather than being installed with `pacman` or `yay`.
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## Problems
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Biggest of all blendOS's problems is how slow it is to rebuild. It doesn't save "layers" of packages like [`rpm-ostree`](https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree) (as used by Fedora atomic)
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## Wishlist
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## Sources
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- \[1\] [blendOS homepage](https://blendos.co/)
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- \[2\] [blendOS post-install intro](https://blendos.co/install/post-install/intro/)
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## Footnotes
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- [^1] That is, `http://github.com/blend-os/tracks/raw/main` + `/` + `default-gnome` + `.yaml`
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- [^2] In the provided `blend-os/tracks` repo, `default-gnome` actually inherits from the `gnome` track.
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