this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
96 points (91.4% liked)
Linux
48008 readers
815 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not niche, but surely exotic: NixOS, a distribution that is configured via a purely functional language. There is no such thing as installing or uninstalling packages, you add or remove things from your configuration and then simply apply that configuration.
I really wanted to like NixOS (and I do, theoretically), but I couldn't dedicate more than 5 full days over Christmas to learn how to get to a working development system.
May I ask what the issue actually was? Was it about "working system" or about "working development system"?
I don't recall needing more than two days for getting a system up and running for the first time, and in fact it worked so well that I switched all my machines to it by now; granted, I have changed a lot about the configuration ever since and there seem to be a lot of paths to take in the beginning and it's not always clear which one to take. But getting a working system, even one suited for development (personally, I'd recommend a nix development shell for that), shouldn't really take that long.
For me, the main blocker was just getting my head around the concept of it, as it seems like such a wild idea for a distro. I still don't think I'm 100% there, but I have enough down now to cobble a working system together at least.
Working development system. I got quite far, but after so much work, became very frustrated when a VSCode plugin wouldn't work properly because it needed (and assumed) read/write access. I didn't want to have to manage and think about every little plugin I experimented with at the OS level.
It's very good for servers. I wouldn't use it on desktop.
Using it on all my machines (desktop and notebooks), can't really complain – but then again, couldn't really complain about Arch either
I think it could be good for something like an office, where it might be beneficial to have everyone on an identical setup that's immutable so they can't mess with it, and can (presumably) be duplicated by just copying a config file.
I assume the con would be that if something breaks in an update, it probably breaks for everyone. But by the same token, the solution should fix it for everyone too.
I couldn’t even get the installer to work. Tried a couple times but it just wouldn’t install so I gave up on it - still want to try it though
You can manually install it