Yep. Right now, the way I see it, is that each different standard is doing a different thing right:
- nixos, with declarative packaging and system definition
- guix, with reproducible builds
- gentoo, with the ability to stand up a gentoo system from a minimal bootstrap
- arch and slackware, with performant, speedy package resolution
- fedora silverblue and haiku, with the immutable packaging model and packages as an overlay to the filesystem
- wubi, with its ability to stand up on an existing OS installation non-intrusively
but also different things wrong:
- nixos, with a mandatory degree in linux system engineering
- guix, with the same plus restrictive GNU/FOSS-only software
- gentoo, infamous for both the above and needing to spin on compiling software for sometimes hours to days
- arch, with constant stability problems, fragmented package repositories, and still having the nerd factor of the above three
- silverblue, with a fundamentally incompatible system layer and less QA than even Arch somehow, despite Fedora itself being very stable
- haiku, by virtue of being not linux, is unfortunately not linux
- wubi was characterized by being a danger to the host system, corrupting its drives, because it was too early for it (NTFS drivers were very much not ready.)
These problems and solutions are not mutually exclusive to one another, and styx aims to somewhat unify this base.
"installing" styx can happen from a windows or macos GUI. no partitioning happens, no bootloader is modified. the kernel is the boot file, and it can be signed for your machine. styx's packages are single files, most of the time, with all of an application's libraries self-contained. they are double-click to run in place; and to "install" them, you drag them to /styx/packages (or right click, then choose install).
at least, these are goals. I'm writing up documentation for it right now, and it will take some significant engineering to make it happen - but we're also doing the least work possible when it comes to it, making use of relatively unexplored (outside of like, enterprise, Android and embedded Linux) existing technologies and features of the Linux kernel, systemd and the like, where possible.