this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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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.
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I dont think thats really the goal here. NixOS is not designed to be used by your grandmother. Better Documentation would sometimes be nice though.
By the way, there already is https://github.com/vlinkz/nixos-conf-editor
Probably not the goal, but a NixOS-based begginer distro could be great, with one app to install all your package and one app to manage all your settings. (I personally really like the idea of having app settings in the "general" settings app). But probably the killer advantage of NixOS is that it's really hard to break and really easy to fix, which is important for a distro aimed at the general public.
P.S.: Also check out nix-software-center by the same guy.
Martin Wimpress is working on it https://github.com/wimpysworld/nix-config
It isn't not the goal, either. Nix is very popular with devs for many obvious reasons, so most of the developments naturally has to do with making that an even better experience. That doesn't mean accessibility is a non-goal; there just isn't a great deal of motivation to work on making the operating system easy for non-devs to use.
It has so many interesting possible applications. Declarative and reproducible wine configurations for games and software; universal (cross-distro) packaging (without emulated runtime environments like flatpak); reproducible user environments managed easily with a GUI with trivial version control (both for config and software versions); pre-configuring a system before even setting it up (such as configuring a raspberry pi before you've even bought one so that once you have, you just install and configure everything in one go).