Usage of Homebrew as software installation solution to avoid transactional update

[victoitor]

Small introduction which is not necessary to the topic

I love the concept of Aeon, tried it, had issues and decided to try again when it's released. On the meantime, I decided to try Bluefin. At the same time, it's clear to see both similarities and differences between these two projects. For people who are not aware, the main similarity is to build a desktop that is always updated and never breaks and this is done with atomic updates and snapshots (by different means) and usage of containerisation (flatpaks and distroboxes). The main differences are a minimalistic approach by Aeon and a very opinionated list of installed apps and services by bluefin.

I have also seen @sysrich in one of his talks mentioning the differences in view and a complaint that Aeon is following it's own thing. It might be a recurring topic which can be super annoying which led me to not touch this subject before. Telegram also has a rule for it:

5. “The Silverblue Rule”. Any request or discussion that cites any other Linux distribution to support or justify that request will be deprioritised as a result. Any good idea should have reasons besides just following others.

Although this idea is created as a solution to my issues as I understand how bluefin works, I think this post does follow the Silverblue rule in the sense that my reasoning is not just for "following others". I decided to share as I prefer the Aeon approach and think this may be a positive thing.

I made a post about using Aeon for a computer lab for students in my university research group. The main question was on doing authentication through kanidm. I am a professor at a small and underfunded university in Brazil and the professors have to build these solutions themselves so this is my attempt to improve the situation for our students.

According to the Software Installation wiki, I think this solution requires it to be installed in the Transactional Update level, which should be avoided if possible to keep a clean underlying system. At the same time, I saw that kanidm can be installed through homebrew. Considering how bluefin allows the installation of homebrew isolated from the base packages (it's done on home/linuxbrew), it would be an additional way to avoid doing the transactional update installation.

Would this be interesting as a last resort to not getting into transactional update territory and as a way to simplify the possible installation of binaries or is there a reason for this not to be a good solution?