Yeah that would be the “cloud native” way XD

I have used Gitea actions and container registry before, it is okay.

Your specific NixOS problem it not unique

They do check some packages but not all, only the critical ones. And there is a tool to check if there a hydra build failures before updating.

But yeah it is problematic that NixOS is primarily source-based, most importantly as hydra builds everything and if a binary is not there, that is like always a build failure. Requesting those infos from hydra all the time also makes no sense, so this should really be solved on the branch/channel level

VanillaOS and OpenSUSE immutable ones use BTRFS snapshots dont they? Not sure how VanillaOS does their A/B root.

These systems always involve copying things around and deduplicating them.

Filesystem snapshots are well deduplicated, nixos does that well too though.

I can recommend universal blues base kinoite image as it includes distrobox, all video codecs and has an nvidia variant for the poor nvidia users

Works, fedora atomic desktops with ostree and no changes. If you want changes using rpm-ostree that will become really slow.

NixOS is also immutable and if you dont stumble over something that needs compilation as it is not in the binary caches, it runs very fine on lower end hardware like my Chromebook. Not a potato but pretty damn slow

Framework if you dont mind relying on the Community for coreboot support.

Otherwise System76, Novacustom, Starlabs, Nitropad, … there is a handful of sellers of coreboot laptops which is a market you should totally invest in. Coreboot is amazing and there is quite a variety!

Also not to forget Chromebooks, but they are extremely limited and mostly unrepairable.