4 ms·

Based on your experience then, do you feel something like Fedora Silverblue will ultimately be more successful than a NixOS approach?

by ahnick 6y ago

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
I think silverblue will take off because it seems a lot simpler to use. I haven't tried out either yet but it looks like silverblue simply asks you to use flatpak instead of dnf while nix requires you to learn a complex config programming language.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
I mean, both are going to die eventually. But Nix will be more "successful" because its niche will keep die-hards around a lot longer to maintain it. Silverblue will be abandoned much earlier due to lack of interest in maintainership when they realize it's so complex that most people won't want to deal with it. As a comparison: Slackware is still around. It hasn't had a stable release in 5 years, but it's in active development (the latest sudo 0-day was patched the day it was reported; how's that for long-term support?). Is that "successful"? I dunno, but I'll bet Nix ends up the same way, because it's run for and by 'server people'. Nix's approach is more for server people, and Fedora's is more for desktop people. But both are unnecessarily complicated and don't provide any significant benefit over a traditional distro's packaging for the average user. Regular-old packaging is "good enough" for 99.95% of use cases, and that which has problems is usually just crap software that's hard to make work in any situation. Linux has always been, and will always be, a toy rather than a practical tool. But for server administrators and embedded engineers (the drivers of its most common use cases) they'll never use either of those distros, because they aren't KISS. Regular-old package management and FHS isn't sexy, but it's very well understood and fairly easy to work with. Modern industry standard is to treat old-style distros and old-style packaging as cattle, but the above distros are pets. Though Android devs probably love the two distros. As a side note to all this: I tried a 12-year-old copy of a Linux Desktop on a 12-year-old machine the other day, I think it was Gnome 1 based. Everything on it blew the fuck away everything on my 2018 Linux laptop for speed. I was depressed the rest of the day. Not just because new software is bloated and buggy and slow as shit, but because I knew I couldn't use that old software on the modern web, and all applications are now web applications. No modern web browser will work on such an old machine, and you can't browse the web at all without a modern browser. So Flatpak on modern distros is supposed to fix this, right? Run any version of any app? But not if new Flatpaks, or the software inside of them, eventually change so much they won't run on old Flatpak-running systems. Or people just don't package their software in a Flatpak. And there is not a single guarantee in the entire project that they will keep compatibility for a long time, because Flatpak has nothing to do with future-proofness. So this is "the future of Apps on Linux": the same BS a new box. Additional aside: Why the fuck is Android 10's "system files" taking up 19 fucking gigabytes on my phone? What the fuck is in there, the fucking Library of Congress? An 8K video of Linus Torvalds giving me the finger?

Based on your experience then, do you feel something like Fedora Silverblue will ultimately be more successful than a NixOS approach?

by ahnick 6y ago

Based on your experience then, do you feel something like Fedora Silverblue will ultimately be more successful than a NixOS approach?

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago

I think silverblue will take off because it seems a lot simpler to use. I haven't tried out either yet but it looks like silverblue simply asks you to use flatpak instead of dnf while nix requires you to learn a complex config programming language.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

I mean, both are going to die eventually. But Nix will be more "successful" because its niche will keep die-hards around a lot longer to maintain it. Silverblue will be abandoned much earlier due to lack of interest in maintainership when they realize it's so complex that most people won't want to deal with it. As a comparison: Slackware is still around. It hasn't had a stable release in 5 years, but it's in active development (the latest sudo 0-day was patched the day it was reported; how's that for long-term support?). Is that "successful"? I dunno, but I'll bet Nix ends up the same way, because it's run for and by 'server people'. Nix's approach is more for server people, and Fedora's is more for desktop people. But both are unnecessarily complicated and don't provide any significant benefit over a traditional distro's packaging for the average user. Regular-old packaging is "good enough" for 99.95% of use cases, and that which has problems is usually just crap software that's hard to make work in any situation. Linux has always been, and will always be, a toy rather than a practical tool. But for server administrators and embedded engineers (the drivers of its most common use cases) they'll never use either of those distros, because they aren't KISS. Regular-old package management and FHS isn't sexy, but it's very well understood and fairly easy to work with. Modern industry standard is to treat old-style distros and old-style packaging as cattle, but the above distros are pets. Though Android devs probably love the two distros. As a side note to all this: I tried a 12-year-old copy of a Linux Desktop on a 12-year-old machine the other day, I think it was Gnome 1 based. Everything on it blew the fuck away everything on my 2018 Linux laptop for speed. I was depressed the rest of the day. Not just because new software is bloated and buggy and slow as shit, but because I knew I couldn't use that old software on the modern web, and all applications are now web applications. No modern web browser will work on such an old machine, and you can't browse the web at all without a modern browser. So Flatpak on modern distros is supposed to fix this, right? Run any version of any app? But not if new Flatpaks, or the software inside of them, eventually change so much they won't run on old Flatpak-running systems. Or people just don't package their software in a Flatpak. And there is not a single guarantee in the entire project that they will keep compatibility for a long time, because Flatpak has nothing to do with future-proofness. So this is "the future of Apps on Linux": the same BS a new box. Additional aside: Why the fuck is Android 10's "system files" taking up 19 fucking gigabytes on my phone? What the fuck is in there, the fucking Library of Congress? An 8K video of Linus Torvalds giving me the finger?