Checking out blendOS

WARNING: This page is a work-in-progress, and is very incomplete. Read at your own risk.

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...

Installation

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 - 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.

First use

Upon first boot, blendOS drops you into a pretty standard GNOME session, on account of the /system.yaml file by default:

impl: http://github.com/blend-os/tracks/raw/main
repo: https://pkg-repo.blendos.co
track: default-gnome

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 file1.

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 configs2 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.

Configuration

blendOS's configuration is really simple:

impl: http://github.com/blend-os/tracks/raw/main
repo: https://pkg-repo.blendos.co
track: default-gnome

arch-repo: 'https://repo-goes-here.example'

packages:
  - 'fish'

aur-packages:
  - 'EVEN-MORE-FISH'

services:
  - 'service-goes-here'

user-services:
  - 'user-service-goes-here'

package-repos:
  - name: 'repo name'
    repo-url: 'https://repo.url'

commands:
  'echo hiiiiiii > /home/user/helloooooo'

It's quite basic, but blendOS actually works very well for me; I already have a Git repo of all my 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.

Problems

Biggest of all blendOS's problems is how slow it is to rebuild. It doesn't save "layers" of packages like rpm-ostree (as used by Fedora atomic)

Wishlist

Sources

Footnotes