Another distribution which ditches the FHS is NixOS. On top of this, it implements a configuration management system as a core part of the OS, is a source distro with an online binary cache (so installing things by default doesn't require building anything, but it's very easy to modify package definitions), and allows for very easy rollbacks, multiple system environments, and a bunch more interesting stuff. It's also not had a multi-year hiatus as a recent part of its history.
True. But the hashes Nix uses in folder names make it a bit more complicated than it has to be. But I like both GoboLinux and NixOS and really hope one of them or a similar approach takes off some day.
As someone that just (2? 3? days ago) migrated his laptop to nixos I can certainly sympathize. That said, hashes aren't a big issue and the community is quite nice. Packages aren't thaaaat up to date, but pull requests to bump these things are answered in days (sometimes hours). I have FreeBSD PRs open for weeks...
In the end I like it. I'm not sure if this is the best thing ever, but I appreciate the fact that I have a single file that describes my whole system.
> Packages aren't thaaaat up to date, but pull requests to bump these things are answered in days (sometimes hours).
It's also possible to write custom packages as part of your configuration if you need them "right now", through `packageOverrides`. As a general rule, packages are updated by people who need newer versions of packages; there's not really a maintainer infrastructure like most distros have. If something needs to be done, whoever is affected by it does that thing. I'll point out that there's not a security team either yet, so it's not really suitable for real production use.
Personally, as someone who's battled the usual configuration management approach of "here's a fully working OS with its own ideas of how things should be done... now modify that through a really awful ad-hoc scripting language without breaking anything", NixOS is amazing. It's even possible to build tests into your system configuration!
