If you want minimal deterministic containers with low complexity and high supply chain integrity, check out stagex, which is a distro purpose built for this problem: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex

Some of the ways it compares to nix/guix is included as a table in the readme.

Hi, I’m the author of the talk on module contracts. Thank you so much Daroc Alden for the great write-up! Happy to answer any questions.

Mods, can we expand SCALE to Southern California Linux Expo in the title so people can tell what this is about?

Nix has been a great boon for my workstation. I can effectively stage changes before going through with them, and rollback is quite simple too. It is great to have an immutable environment with which to test changes upon.

> Iaso explained that layer ordering is "an illusion" that doesn't actually impact the functionality of the image (unless one layer overwrites a file provided by another layer), and that Nix picks an arbitrary order.

Wat?

Occasionally this is the entire purpose of a layer.. is it true it's unreliable? Or only non-deterministic under Nix? I thought deterministic builds are a huge selling point with Nix (admittedly, I haven't tried it yet, because intimidated and my existing tools don't irk me enough to bite the bullet.. yet).

s/Scale/SCALE/g

Apparently, Scale here is not what people commonly mean. Clickbait!