By default, Fedora Atomic envisions the following in regards to installing packages/software:
First, try the Flatpak.
If that doesn’t work, use Toolbx(/Distrobox).
If all else fails, resort to rpm-ostree.
This works pretty fine, but isn’t perfect:
Flatpak has become pretty good for software with a GUI. However, while it can do CLI, it’s underutilized.
Toolbx/Distrobox has its merits, but not everyone enjoys consuming CLI through containers.
Besides the fact that installing all your CLI tools through rpm-ostree will negatively impact how fast you can update your system, it also requires you to (soft-)reboot before you can access the newly installed package (unless you enjoy living on the edge with –apply-live). This can be pretty cumbersome, especially if you’re in flow.
Thus, the situation around CLI on Fedora Atomic became a sore to the eyes. Within the community, there were multiple attempts to tackle this problem:
Nix; For some time, this was the perfect solution. Unfortunately, in its current iteration, installing Nix on Fedora Atomic requires SELinux’ enforcing mode to be turned off. As turning enforcing mode off is unacceptable for uBlue’s maintainers, this was eventually dismissed.
Better tooling around Toolbx/Distrobox; There have been made some efforts in this regard, perhaps most notably Ptyxis. But, we’re not there yet. Though, some are hopeful of what podmansh will bring to the table.
Homebrew; It behaves as any other package manager used for installing packages from the repository on any Linux distro out there. Except, in this case, it’s exclusively utilized for CLI. Currently, it’s simply the most straightforward in use. You just have to teach people to replace their apt/dnf/ pacman with flatpak (for GUI) and brew (for CLI). Furthermore, it comes with a big and healthy repository. Finally, it utilizes technologies related to the ones found on Fedora Atomic.