For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
If you can’t change etc, how do you configure your software?
Using NixOS options
By having the right configuration file there as part of the package’s options, like:
globalProgram.doFoo = true;or something likeglobalProgram.extraConfig = "barCount=4567";Are those changes system-wide or stored in user space? Where are those files stored?
It’s system-wide (unless home-manager is involved).
They’re a part of the immutable install, whose components reside in
/nix/storeand are symlinked to/etc.Example from my computer:
$ realpath /etc/sddm.conf /nix/store/slkq2k8vc4rx4ag55zf8ssl7qd9ry49v-sddm.conf