linuxoveruser

The purpose of having a web-based user interface is to enable remote installation using a web-browser, which I imagine could be a pretty common use-case for server installation. Since a web-based interface is necessary for remote installation, it makes sense to use the same interface locally instead of having two independent interfaces.

Nix is probably the best way to get all of those things set up without shipping a whole distro, but there will be a bit of a learning curve. If you’d like something a bit easier to set up for development (still based on Nix), I’d recommend devenv.sh.

Maybe Discourse? The mobile website is pretty good and there are also a number of third-party mobile apps.

I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.

NixOS

I love NixOS, but the documentation is terrible. Better documentation would go a long way to making it a more user-friendly platform.

I’d also check out poetry2nix if you’re a poetry fan and interested in building your package with nix. See https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-08-12-poetry2nix/.

you should have no problem doing Python dev on nixos, it’s basically made for doing development environments like this without the need for containers. you should just be able to set up a nix shell for your project that contains python and all the necessary dependencies, and then enter the shell. then, you’ll have all the right dependencies installed for your project and still have access to any editors you have installed

it sounds like rpios is using wayfire now, which is probably quite lightweight and can run on any distro