Recently, I have been using GNOME OS, as my daily driver.
After being a seasoned Linux for long, dabbling in distros like Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora (and even Silverblue), I tried switching to something more opinionated and that “works by default” all while being hard to break.
And given my existing relationship with GNOME, GNOME OS was a choice worth looking into.
One feature of GNOME OS is that it is immutable (i.e. system files are read-only). It also doesn’t ship with a package manager, so it doesn’t have functionality built-in to install extra packages.
You can install GUI Applications normally using Flathub (and Snap/AppImage), but installing non-GUI applications like development tools or CLI packages is not built-in.
There are of course several solutions you can use, such as homebrew, coldbrew, but today we will focus on mise.
What is mise?
mise pitches itself as “One tool to manage languages, env vars, and tasks per project, reproducibly.”
However, I only use a fraction of it’s functionality, in that I only use it to install packages.
How to install it?
The instructions are here: https://mise.jdx.dev/getting-started.html
But essentially it’s as easy as running this (remember to read the source of the installer first):
curl https://mise.run | shActivating mise
Then you will need to “activate” mise, which essentially makes tools installed by mise available by modifying your $PATH variable
echo 'eval "$(~/.local/bin/mise activate bash --shims)"' >> ~/.bashrcThe instructions above are for bash, so you will need to consult the docs to get instructions for your shell.
You will need to re-login for the mise command to be available, or open a new shell.
A note on shims
Feel free to skip this section, as it’s just an explainer
Also, note that the above command use the --shims flag, which is NOT the default. It essentially means that mise will modify the $PATH variable, instead of doing a weird thing where it will re-activate itself after each command you run.
The non-shim way to activate mise is useful when you use mise to install different package versions across different repositories, but that sometimes breaks IDEs and is our of the scope of this blog post.
Installing packages
You can start installing your first package with mise:
mise use -g javaThe above command installs java globally (hence the -g flag), which you can now confirm by running:
$ java --version
openjdk 26.0.1 2026-04-21
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 26.0.1+8-34)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 26.0.1+8-34, mixed mode, sharing)You can install much more tools, of which you can find a non-complete list here: mise-tools.
For example, you can similarly install a specific major version of nodejs
mise use -g node@22Or install the latest LTS version of node
mise use -g node@ltsOr you can be overlay specific
mise use -g [email protected]
mise use -g [email protected] # this works too!Searching
Use mise search to find packages.
mise search typ
Tool Description
typos Source code spell checker. https://github.com/crate-ci/typos
typst A new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn. https://github.com/typst/typst
typstyle Beautiful and reliable typst code formatter. https://github.com/Enter-tainer/typstyle
quicktype Generate types and converters from JSON, Schema, and GraphQL provided by https://quicktype.io. https://www.npmjs.com/package/quicktypeUninstalling
mise unuse -g nodeUpdating
mise self-update # updating mise itself
mise up # updating tools installed by mise
mise outdated # checking if you have outdated toolsConfig File
Tools you install with mise globally will be saved in the file ~/.config/mise/config.toml, which you can commit to your dotfiles so you can have similar tools across different machines.
Here’s an example of my mise config file at the time of writing this blog post.
# ~/.config/mise/config.toml
[tools]
bat = "latest"
btop = "latest"
bun = "latest"
caddy = "latest"
"cargo:mergiraf" = "latest"
deno = "latest"
difftastic = "latest"
doggo = "latest"
fastfetch = "latest"
fzf = "latest"
github-cli = "latest"
"github:railwayapp/railpack" = "latest"
glab = "latest"
helix = "latest"
java = "latest"
lazygit = "latest"
node = "latest"
"npm:vscode-langservers-extracted" = "latest"
oha = "latest"
pipx = "latest"
pnpm = "latest"
prettier = "latest"
rust = "latest"
scooter = "latest"
tmux = "latest"
usage = "latest"
yt-dlp = { version = "latest", rename_exe = "yt-dlp" }
zellij = "latest"
"github:patryk-ku/music-discord-rpc" = { version = "latest", asset_pattern = "music-discord-rpc" }
rclone = "latest"
mc = "latest"
go = "latest"
"go:git.sr.ht/~migadu/alps/cmd/alps" = "latest"
"npm:localtunnel" = "latest"After the tools inside the config has changed, you can run the following comand to make mise re-install packages from the config file
mise installMise Backends
Mise is able to install packages from multiple sources. These sources are called “backends” by mise.
When you type mise use -g node@22, it will resolve node against the registry and figure out that the default backend for node is core
Core
The default backend is called core and tools from this backend are usually provided from the official source.
Other tools that are available from core include Node.js, Ruby, Python, etc…
We could also have been explicit with the backend we want to use
mise use -g core:nodeYou can find a list of all core packages here.
Aqua
You can also install packages from the Aqua registry.
Language Package Managers
You can also install tools from their respective package managers. Here are a few examples
npm
You can install prettier, typescript, oxlint and other JavaScript/TypeScript tools published on the npm registry. Find the tools on npm
mise use -g npm:prettierpipx
You can install black, poetry and other Python tools from pypi. Find the tools on pypi
mise use -g pipx:black
pipx:git+https://github.com/psf/black.git # from a github repocargo
You can install cargo packages with this backed. You need to have rust installed beforehand though, which you can do with mise
mise use -g rustThen install your packages
mise use -g cargo:ezaThere are more language package manager backends like: gem, go and more.
Github
You can install packages from Github directly, as long as the project you are trying to install from uses Github releases
mise use -g github:railwayapp/railpackmise will usually auto-detect which asset you want to use, but you can also specify the asset glob in ~/.config/mise/config.toml
[tools]
"github:patryk-ku/music-discord-rpc" = { version = "latest", asset_pattern = "music-discord-rpc" }