> I'm a Nix contrarian, so naturally I wanted something to be to Docker like NixOS is to Nix. docker-boot fills this niche.
not least because I've also been trying to figure out if there isn't a way to do nearly everything nix does with way better ease of use using docker or something similar.
That said,
> It also drives libostree and Nix users mad, because it can be used to try out a new DE or even a whole OS without polluting the host filesystem or spawning a virtual machine. The video in the README shows me trying out KDE + SDDM from a host running GNOME + GDM3.
is needlessly combative and also not really a comparison that makes your solution look good; neither of those options "pollute" the host filesystem, they at most cache results thereby saving work until you tell them to garbage collect at which point it goes away (and this also means that they're not limited to the size of RAM), and neither of them needs a VM in order to cleanly transition from one configuration to another.
no, it really doesn't. (nixos-generators has multiple ready-to-go kexec options, nixos-anywhere is entirely built on the concept, etc, etc. It would be a two-line change to pull in the kexec module into any of my computers configurations [or all of them!], and another single command to kexec reboot into it.)
> How often do you screw up the system so much you have to reformat the disk (without losing data) to fix it?
Have you heard of NixOS? Where this is nigh impossible?
lol
Never. But I am curious as to what you are doing to get into this situation so often.