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It is. But I have this radical idea that with a declarative toolbox like what NixOS offers, most distros are trivial. Lots of simple distros are doable with a
by nextos 7y ago
It is. But I have this radical idea that with a declarative toolbox like what NixOS offers, most distros are trivial.
Lots of simple distros are doable with a page or two of declarative Nix configuration. They are just some opinionated choices concerning a variety of components, a desktop environment and some default applications (or the lack of thereof). Gentoo is also a meta-distro in some ways.
Of course, if you want some fundamental changes, you might not be able to stretch NixOS that far. Or if you prefer an imperative approach to things.
IMHO, most distro designs (imperative/declarative, binary/source-based) have been explored already. Forking yet a new distro is not advisable, unless you have some novel ideas or just want the educational experience.
- jason_slack 7y agoMy goal is to have a very small distro, yet easily customizable so I can deploy it over and over very quickly with small changes, etc but also modern enough of a start to promote pull requests to the projects being used in the distro.
- forgottenpass 7y agoLFS is a deep dive for learning, not a way to create a production base. I'd suggest stripping down whatever distro you already like unless you have an exotic target platform or highly constrained resource (like embedded systems). The off the shelf distros can typically be customized much smaller than their "minimal" images. That "minimal" usually means "a reasonable base for your headless server" not "the least amount of software needed to boot." You'll be able to stay in a packaging ecosystem and process you already know. Learn how to create a custom deployable image and with any luck you'll still be able to leverage their build systems, testing and repos. If you are talking more constrained than that or an unusual architecture, Yocto seems to be where most of the embedded Linux folks are these days. That targets highly-configurable custom compiling everything from the ground up, lots of additional software packages are available to be layered in.