I recently spent a week trying out Fedora Silverblue so keep in mind I am not running it anymore and actually installed guixsd (probably a article about that switch soon). Fedora silverblue is very experimental and a interesting concept. It revolves around the idea that there is a immutable base system which can’t be changed easily. This is the biggest aspect that is close to nixos and guixsd however the way you deal with this immuatable base is very different. Note that var is the only mutable directory and everything else is symlinked to it including /home/user.
So when you try to install a package natively you need to use ostree which saves a snapshot of your current and previous proflies. You can then like nixos go into previous versions on boot. However when installing new software you have to actually restart your computer so this method is supposed to be a more permanent way to install stuff.
The other way to install programs is by using a flatpak. This is nice for apps that have flatpak support and doesnt require you to restart or anything weird.
Both of the previous mentioned ways to install packages doesn’t let you develop applications. It only allows you to run final applications or would require you to restart after every new library installed. So in order to solve that silverblue comes with another application installed called toolbox.
Now toolbox isnt unique to fedora silverblue as its basically a shell wrapper aroud two container technologies (I forget the names) which allows you to run containers like they are native. You can create different profiles with completely different containers but generally you only need 1 or 2. To enter said container just run
toolbox enter
and the run a application from it do
toolbox run programname
You can add .desktop so that you can easily run these apps instead of having to run shell commands. Also the default image is a Fedora 31 container so you have access to anything that fedora 31’s dnf has.
I personally ran it on a 3gb 2 core thinkpad and the performance didn’t make it unusable just took a little longer to start applications. Also I have found that alot of apps I needed like gqrx was not available as a flatpak which was really annoying. I wanted to keep development ONLY inside containers and applications ONLY as flatpak but I couldn’t. Also coming from arch/gentoo I found it annoying having to jump through the fedora hoops to run software inside a container not even natively. Other then these things I found it good. In my opinion this distrobution deserves to exist.