I use Windows btw
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
338 points (84.3% liked)
linuxmemes
21645 readers
1219 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ah, the eternal distro hopping. I can relate. Frankly, I do think that Vanilla OS and even something like NixOS are genuinely exciting development in the world of Linux distributions. I'm unfamiliar with Fedora Kinoite, but skimming thorough its page, it looks really good! In general, I do like this side of things where Linux distributions tend to focus on being "universal" and "reliable", even if it means fundamentally pushing forward and away from the traditional this-distro-does-this-uniquely-and-manage-packages-like-this thing. I'm not super well versed in Vanilla OS but I did watch The Linux Experiment's video on it. I believe that it is immutable and installing packages through GNOME software defaults to the Flatpak format. Another thing is that you can create/launch containerised systems inside your OS, perhaps for developers or tinkerers who want to mess with different OSes.
NixOS on the other hand, well I think it's a package manager as well as a distro (?), and it basically builds packages in containers or in isolation of some sort. I do like this philosophy of containerising things to manage them by themselves individually (I think? sorta like Flatpak?), and NixOS also makes it immediately reproducible by its declarative system management. I think this sort of development is really good since it is a battle against the naturally occurring fragmentation in the Linux environment. Perhaps, there will be less "apt snap pacman yay zypper dnf yum emerge etc", since the method of having unique repos for each distro can be a bit annoying and time-consuming for the overall Linux and open-source ecosystem, though I think it's okay for the most part. Making the fundamental design and maintenance of the systems and packages modular is really great, since we'll have better hardware and software in the future. It is pretty exciting, for me at least.
Haha I'm flattered, thank you! I promise you I absolutely suck at all in these things, I just have some really minor interest in *-nix stuff. I'm not in the tech field (at least not right now), I'm just a postgraduate student studying solar cells. I used MX Linux for about a year during my final year of bachelor's degree, and right now I'm toying around with Arch. I'm that new kid interested in Linux, you know? I think in general I'm more interested in the free / open-source software (FOSS) world. Throughout several years, I played around with Ubuntu/Lubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, even tried FreeBSD, and experimented just a tad bit with Alpine. Read about UNIX, GNU, Linux, FOSS stuff, and then OS, software, programming, web, technology stuff. Then I just have my own setup using almost entirely FOSS for personal use (mostly browsing, writing, learning programming, and some light retro gaming for leisure), and also for academic work (LaTeX, Zotero, Taguette, just a little bit of Python). I'm also using Vim. Again, I'm that excited kid, ya know? Anyway, I'm just a science student, but only now getting quite interested in Linux, computers and software in general. No experience in the tech field at all. Thank you though!
NixOS is really cool! I've actually tried it out a couple of times, and I find the premise of a completely reproducible system to be incredibly intriguing. In the time that I've tried it, I've found that it strays a bit too close to the "The way this system is designed is getting in the way of the things I want or need to do with my PC" - but it will up there on the distros to circle back to every now and then to see if things change.
You're correct that Nix is a few different things, it's a language (the Nix language), a package manager (Nix as a package manager), and then finally a distro as well (NixOS) - when running NixOS you get the benefits of all of them wrapped up in a convenient package so that your whole system can be managed in a declarative way (even down to your home folder / "dot files" if you use Home Manager - which technically also works outside of NixOS too).
Your knowledge of the FOSS world is stellar, even if you're not in the tech field - keep up the great work because I can tell you've got some wonderful adventures ahead of you!
I see, that's what Nix is! Interesting. Perhaps someday it can change and improve until it becomes a seriously viable distro for most people. It'll be a sight to see.
Hey thanks man, I appreciate it! Thanks for this conversation too! Hopefully we can have more conversations like this in the future. 😄