The Bootc Use Case for Desktop Linux
Next to all my handcrafted installs of Slackware, Gentoo, even FreeBSD I'm a fanboy of so-called immutable or atomic or composable distros. MicroOS, Kinoite, BlendOS, I've used them all and I like the idea behind it. Look at your Linux distro as an Android or Ios image: once it gets updated, it'll be made available to you. Install it at your convenience and if something goes wrong you'll stick with the old image for now. Taking all this a step further is Bluefin, which now creates that image for you as a bootc container. This means one file, with everything baked in, kernel, software etc. So, recently, I've been cooking my own two bootc containers. Just because i can. One KDE one and a Cosmic one. I have similar, reproducible, setups on NixOS. They update automatically also and the next time you boot into your updated config. So now I am wondering what the use case for these bootc containers is? Especially for regular desktop users. The specific Bluefin and Aurora base contains a lot of fluff, which is nice. But do you need all that? Asking the question is answering it at the same time. It is very much geared towards its intended audience: people working in software development and adjacent industries. Me, I'm a regular guy, and re-explore my NixOS setups; they look very much more geared towards normal desktop users, whilst giving all security and fallback at the same time.