While I have a lot of respect for Ikey and think he's extremely talented, he tends to start a project and then either move to something else or disappear. Hey, life happens, and doing open source work for free is a grind, so it's not meant as an insult. But I'd see Serpent as a toy/POC rather than a long lived OS. I'm excited to try it, either way.

I -believe- I read that a lot of this work will be going into Solus, a previous Ikey project, which has a new team and small community now. So hopefully this is kinda best of both worlds if true for both sides.

It might be an "OS" but it has a Linux kernel. It's a self-acclaimed "pioneering Linux distribution". It has some features other distros/tools implement to some extent as well: rebootless atomic upgrades, rollback. See Fedora/rpm-os-tree, Nix etc.

Why someone would want an imperative distro over a declaratively configured one?

Had to click around to figure this out: it’s yet another Linux distribution. Seems to be focused on quality-of-life for Rust developers.

prealpha is such a weird name, just call it a dev/nightly build or an actual alpha

I find it very hard to get excited about this shell-scripts-in-YAML-with-macros language:

https://github.com/serpent-os/recipes/blob/b269cef9b42645b89...

    setup       : |
        %patch %(pkgdir)/enhance-config.patch
        %patch %(pkgdir)/0001-Make-sway-stateless.patch
        %meson -Ddefault_sysconfdir=%(vendordir)%(sysconfdir)
    build       : |
        %meson_build
    install     : |
        %meson_install

It’s ikey! I’ll follow this and when it goes to beta really dive in.

> Rebootless atomic updates - no more interruptions

Does it mean the same as in all other distros when you install packages and they restart the services? Or does it actually replace the kernel as well? Maybe a stupid question, but the latter would be revolutionary, even if it is technically already possible, but very elaborated.

If the latter is not true, you should still reboot after a kernel update and there is not much difference to most other distributions.

did they implement the linux system call interface or come up with their own? how linux-compatible is it? it must be pretty complete if it can run firefox

For an ISO, "Live Mode" can be one of the most useful things.

Looks very cool. Seems to have a very similar feature set to nixos, curious how they compare?

Because most real-world problems are subject to hysteresis [1], and declarative systems fail very badly at modeling history.

A very simple example:

* install a server program, which for security is run as a dedicated (newly-created) user

* run the server program, which generates logs owned by that user.

* uninstall the server program - but the user must not be deleted while the log files exist

This example is simple enough that many declarative systems don't require too much massaging to handle it, but many more complicated examples exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis

No idea. It seems to have gone off in the direction of "shiny and new" without deeply considering more practical architectural decisions like isolating system vs. userland, configuration management, or manageability. It's unfortunate because there are zillions of Linux distros, and most of them (numerically) are terrible, insanely impractical, user hostile, and/or poorly documented. If you're going to create a distro, at least have a use-case justification for it where other distros or other OSes ([wd]o|ca)n't meet the needs of them adequately.

> Why someone would want an imperative distro over a declaratively configured one?

Perhaps most people are not aware of the difference or why it should matter?

After years of reading and study I only have a vague and hazy understanding of functional vs imperative languages, and what one can do in a functional language.

I have not seen any project built around functional programming that really makes a serious effort to explain why it is different or why anyone should care. My overall impression is that most take the attitude of IYKYK -- "if you know, you know" -- and don't even try.

While this is an understandable response to years of incomprehension and lack of interest, it's still a poor response.

I have spent _hours_ talking with Nix folks trying to get a better understanding and for the most part I have failed.

I would guesstimate that 99% of programmers do not understand FP vs imperative programming and so neither know nor care about FP.

So when the definition of efforts such as Nix and Guix is "we specify configuration using a pure functional language", most readers won't know or care what that means.

The Reddit-ism of "explain it like I'm 5" is a powerful criterion.

I look for people who can give me clear, simple, lucid explanations of what their software is and how it works. When nobody can, I tend to suspect that the software is either not much general use, or that advocacy for it is not based on facts and understanding but by clan loyalty.

Projects which few people can cogently clearly explain to me without jargon and bafflegab include Kubernetes, OStree, and OpenShift. It is, notably, a hallmark of Red Hat, and I speak as a former employee. I was hired to work on one product's documentation. I found that nobody in the company could explain what the product was or did, until I met the 1 person who came from the company that wrote it and which RH acquired.

I think I have an extremely sketchy understanding of the point of Nix and I have tried to explain it, but I am sure it is a weak, poor understanding.

More effort to explain what it means and why it matters would go a long way.

If people were clearly told what "declarative configuration" meant, what it was and what it did and how it worked and why they might want it, then maybe they would care.

I suspect, but do not know, that most do not.

This is true, there are already a plenty of imperative distros to choose from and they offer more or less similar experience. If I ever want to switch to something else, this would be NixOS or another declarative one.