Used Tumbleweed as my main OS for years and this was always a pain point. Why do you need root privileges to connect to a network on a fresh install?? I can’t be bothered to find a link, but Linus Torvalds himself complained about this and said it was the reason he didn’t want his kids to use SUSE/openSUSE on their computers, since he didn’t want them to have root privileges, lol.
If you mean Nix, the package manager, then no packages are actually installed as root. Every package is installed in the Nix store, but programs that need root privileges can’t be run by any user.
One of the (many) great things about Nix is that users don’t need root privileges to install packages.
Yeah, “unfortunately” since Guix is a GNU project, they don’t package the upstream Linux kernel, just linux-libre, which removes a lot of binary blobs. Great if you want a fully free OS, not so great if you need drivers only available in the mainline kernel.
The practical solution to this is to use the channel nonguix, which packages mainline Linux for Guix. You can follow the instructions for nonguix to create a guix ISO with the regular Linux kernel, then make sure your installed system uses that same kernel.
It’s not hard to do, but if one doesn’t have the inclination I’d just recommended using NixOS. :-)
No no, Nix has two ways of handling configurations, where Flakes are the new style, but still experimental. Guix just have one way of handling configurations.
Yeah, it’s been an ongoing debate whether the old Nix style or the newer Flakes are a better approach. I don’t really know that much about it, but thus far I definitely like using Flakes more
NixOS and Guix System! I’m currently using Guix System + Nix (via home-manager, mostly) but you can also do it the other way around.
NixOS uses systemd, but Guix System does not. They are both awesome though. Absolutely my favourite distros. Incredibility flexible, and reproducibility and “declarativeness” are core concepts. The only negative is that they both have quite a steep learning curve, compared to other distros.
I’d absolutely recommend Kubernetes (k3s/rke2) or podman quadlets. Quadlets are a lot easier to get started with, but are still very flexible.
I’d recommend against using portainer. I tried it quite recently and I did not like it at all. A lot of features are paywalled, and was overall just a frustrating experience. I’ve heard it was a lot better some years ago.
I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I’m currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I’m very very happy with it. Previously I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I’ve completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.
I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it “just works” and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we’ll see how that goes.
If you’re willing to put in the time, I think you’ll love NixOS.
Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.
There are lot of synonyms, people just choose some words in different contexts based on how they sound. Why use the word “begin” when the word “start” exists?
Oh, alright! I didn’t know that. Thank you for the info, that’s handy to know.
Maybe because it’s not an obviously wanted feature? But I’m just guessing. You should request it and see what happens, maybe more people want it. I’ve never even thought about it, since in the case of Podman/docker it’s so “obvious” and easy to just mount network shares to the host first. And in the case of Kubernetes you can just mount NFS shares directly into pods.
Agreed, but not quite perfectly. I’ve been using Tumbleweed for years, but there are a few things to think about.
Whereas I’ve very rarely experienced any problems, the package manager is slow compared to the likes of apt and dnf. The repos are large, but the mirrors haven’t always been the fastest for me.
Also “community”. There are always people in OpenSUSE matrix/irc rooms etc, but they are a rather small bunch of people. OpenSUSE doesn’t have close to the community of, say, Ubuntu or Arch.
I definitely do not hate SELinux, I think it’s a great system. But my experience mostly (at home, anyway) comes from managing servers running Kubernetes clusters and, like, just using podman do deploy containers. In both these cases SELinux is a on “just works” basis, for the most part.
Then in enterprise environment that doesn’t run everything on containers, you usually have a very standardized way of applying SELinux policies. At my last place of work we did it via a rather Ansible role. It was simple and easy.
But I can imagine using SELinux at home, where you maybe don’t have these things, might be a rather “mysterious” experience. It’s not the most obvious system.
But learning to write your own policies (even if just trough se2allow or whatever it’s called) does de-mystify SELinix pretty quick.
If Fedora wants to promote FOSS then it would make sense to just have it’s users enable Flathub if they want to. Instead of outright promote a repository that promotes proprietary software.
If you meant it as moral question, then then answer would probably be that proprietary software does’nt guarantee the same user freedoms as free software. And thus does’nt let users control the software that runs on their own computers.
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the info. I was under the impression that Flathub was a default flatpak repo in Fedora anyway.
But yes, always with these trade-offs. It’s bad when package maintainers package software, and it’s bad when software developers package software…
Why is Fedora packaging their own flatpak of OBS in the first place, when a seemingly working, official one is available on Flathub?
Great decision! Not only does this make Tumbleweed match MicroOS better, but also the RHEL-based distros. SELinux is not super obvious to use, of course, but I’ve never understood how AppArmor works.
Ubuntu doesn’t allow pip to install system wide stuff anymore. You can solve that by installing everything in a pyhton virtual environment.
But for real, use Docker/Podman instead. It’s a lot easier, especially if you’re managing several applications!
The Beeline is definitely powerful enough to run a hypervisor, so I would do that if I were you. Proxmox is a very good product and easy enough to use. Personally I use Harvester (with Rancher) but that might be a bit daunting if you’ve not used Kubernetes before.
I would recommend running Proxmox as your OS, spin up a few Debian virtual machines and run your services (Nextcloud, plex/jellyfin, …) with Docker containers. I would personally use Podman, as I think it’s the simpler one to use, but there might be more documentation online for Docker, I’m not sure. But do definitely use containers! You’ll thank yourself in 6 months.
For reverse proxy I would suggest using Traefik, especially is your using Docker/Podman. But there are other good solutions like Nginx Proxy Manager, which has the advantage of being very easy to use. But I do run Traefik on every Podman server I have or any Kubernetes cluster. That way I can just have a wildcard DNS entry for an IP and then every proxy route will just work, whitout having to touch the DNS further.
Also, just a general tip: look into how you can deploy everything using a GitOps flow. Whether that just be with Ansible or more specialized solutions (Kubernetes with ArgoCD or FluxCD is very well suited for this). Look into Terraform/OpenTofu. This last point is nowhere necessary, but if you ever (like me) get tired of forgetting how you setup your infrastructure (virtual machines, application deployments and configuration, etc) you’ll love GitOps.
Oh, but do definitely look into Ansible for configuring your servers. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.
I’ve got nothing against AppImages, but strong disagree there. Flatpaks (and also snaps, I guess) are easy to search for and easy to upgrade. Just add the repo and you’re done.
In AppImages there is no built-in repository management or update machanism(?). At least I remember having to use some third-party tool to do all this, like “Gear” or whatever it’s name is, but they all felt very janky.