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> there is no excuse to that in 21 century countless of people are experiencing countless of package and dependency crap errors. Are you arguing that homebrew

by burrows 10y ago

> there is no excuse to that in 21 century countless of people are experiencing countless of package and dependency crap errors. Are you arguing that homebrew is better than apt-get/pacman/etc? Not to mention the situation with Windows' installers and their standard tactic of spraying my system with DLLs and untrackable registry writes.

orbifold 10y ago
Homebrew is better in one obvious way: You can't break your system and the packages are usually up to date. With pacman you do one wrong step and your system fails to boot.
- regecks 10y ago
  When I was forced to use OS X (for about 2 years), my homebrew stopped working (just partially wiped out and required 'doctor' or whatever) twice due to major OS updates. Not exactly breaking the system, but breaking all the tools I cared about. It also randomly broke on other occasions. Not being a first-class citizen on the OS does matter. Been using Xubuntu 14.04 + i3 (and recently, Qubes OS) full time for 3 years now. Never faced a problem with apt, and I have a sane wm instead of the "drag this window out of the way to see the other window" hell (and not having to use my mouse is an added bonus). I loathe booting into a different OS. There are certainly ways to emulate the Linux experience on OS X. But increasingly I found that OS X wasn't delivering any value in itself (I mostly stuck to iTerm + browser), and the less-than-perfect emulation of the Linux environment became infuriating. Using Arch as a comparison for ease-of-use probably isn't terribly indicative of Linux distros generally. It's "bleeding edge". My experience is as a person who mostly writes software for Linux and admins Linux systems. OS X is just an unambiguous productivity drop for me, but I can appreciate that it is probably not the case for casual use.
ajdlinux 10y ago
I'm really interested in the possibilities that are opened up by package managers such as Nix and Guix. Atomic upgrades/rollbacks, side by side installation of libraries and apps, multi-user support... It's just a shame that the maintainers of Nix think that labelling it as "The Purely Functional Package Manager" is the best way to sell it. Same goes for Guix, "The Emacs of Distros" - they say that like it's a good thing.
- mbrock 10y ago
  They're not trying to sell it. They're hackers who use it for their own purposes and are probably more interested in attracting other hackers who can help out than they are interested in pretending to be a consumer OS or actually being one with all the support and polish and work that entails. Maybe later someone will make the Ubuntu of Nix. The Emacs of distros sounds exactly what I'd want by the way. What's wrong with that?
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    Fair call, they are hackers who use it for their own purposes. I'd just love to see more open source hackers start with the mindset of advancing user experience from the very outset.

by burrows 10y ago

orbifold 10y ago

Homebrew is better in one obvious way: You can't break your system and the packages are usually up to date. With pacman you do one wrong step and your system fails to boot.

regecks 10y ago
When I was forced to use OS X (for about 2 years), my homebrew stopped working (just partially wiped out and required 'doctor' or whatever) twice due to major OS updates. Not exactly breaking the system, but breaking all the tools I cared about. It also randomly broke on other occasions. Not being a first-class citizen on the OS does matter. Been using Xubuntu 14.04 + i3 (and recently, Qubes OS) full time for 3 years now. Never faced a problem with apt, and I have a sane wm instead of the "drag this window out of the way to see the other window" hell (and not having to use my mouse is an added bonus). I loathe booting into a different OS. There are certainly ways to emulate the Linux experience on OS X. But increasingly I found that OS X wasn't delivering any value in itself (I mostly stuck to iTerm + browser), and the less-than-perfect emulation of the Linux environment became infuriating. Using Arch as a comparison for ease-of-use probably isn't terribly indicative of Linux distros generally. It's "bleeding edge". My experience is as a person who mostly writes software for Linux and admins Linux systems. OS X is just an unambiguous productivity drop for me, but I can appreciate that it is probably not the case for casual use.

ajdlinux 10y ago

I'm really interested in the possibilities that are opened up by package managers such as Nix and Guix. Atomic upgrades/rollbacks, side by side installation of libraries and apps, multi-user support... It's just a shame that the maintainers of Nix think that labelling it as "The Purely Functional Package Manager" is the best way to sell it. Same goes for Guix, "The Emacs of Distros" - they say that like it's a good thing.

mbrock 10y ago
They're not trying to sell it. They're hackers who use it for their own purposes and are probably more interested in attracting other hackers who can help out than they are interested in pretending to be a consumer OS or actually being one with all the support and polish and work that entails. Maybe later someone will make the Ubuntu of Nix. The Emacs of distros sounds exactly what I'd want by the way. What's wrong with that?
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  Fair call, they are hackers who use it for their own purposes. I'd just love to see more open source hackers start with the mindset of advancing user experience from the very outset.