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NixOS is the distro for people that want to give up on the concept of a distro. If you want to abandon the entire concept of system libs and set up a custom env

NixOS is the distro for people that want to give up on the concept of a distro. If you want to abandon the entire concept of system libs and set up a custom environment (or if you're lucky, have someone else write the multiple config files) every time you want to run something, NixOS is for you. If you want to embrace the fragmentation in linux and make it so no dev can ever expect a consistent set of libs, NixOS is for you. If you want to play around like your home desktop computer is for a business and do some cargo culting, NixOS is for you. That's not to say nix is bad. But NixOS definitely is.

pxc 3y ago
> NixOS is the distro for people that want to give up on the concept of a distro Indeed! NixOS is for people who are done distrohopping. It's for people who see through the superficial differences between distros and realize that their most essential differentiators are their own tooling (package managers, initial ramdisk management system, init system, etc.), and that the massive landscape of distros actually boils down to a handful of configurations in terms of those key choices, with some defaults lightly sprinkled on top. Once you reach that point in your Linux journey, you generally don't care very much about those defaults, and what makes a distro interesting or appealing is a solid foundation that suits your preferences. The rest is easy to swap out or modify to your liking. > If you want to embrace the fragmentation in linux and make it so no dev can ever expect a consistent set of libs, NixOS is for you Indeed, NixOS is not a platform designed to serve as a ready-made target for proprietary software that wants to just make assumptions about what is present and hope for the best. But it does support Flatpak, Podman, Docker, Steam, etc., for devs that want to distribute software that targets some other such runtime instead of distributing source code. > If you want to [...] set up a custom environment [...] every time you want to run something The above is massively exaggerated, but kinda yeah. Years before I took up NixOS, I learned how to package software for a few distros and developed some tooling preferences. I realized that with some basic packaging skills, I could run any system I thought was interesting, stable, or useful and just package what is needed along the way. So when I came to NixOS, occasionally having to package things was not a big problem for me. Such users are a great fit for NixOS, and the NixOS community has a lot of them.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> If you want to embrace the fragmentation in linux and make it so no dev can ever expect a consistent set of libs, How so? Nix gives packages whatever libs they ask for just like any distro

pxc 3y ago

> NixOS is the distro for people that want to give up on the concept of a distro Indeed! NixOS is for people who are done distrohopping. It's for people who see through the superficial differences between distros and realize that their most essential differentiators are their own tooling (package managers, initial ramdisk management system, init system, etc.), and that the massive landscape of distros actually boils down to a handful of configurations in terms of those key choices, with some defaults lightly sprinkled on top. Once you reach that point in your Linux journey, you generally don't care very much about those defaults, and what makes a distro interesting or appealing is a solid foundation that suits your preferences. The rest is easy to swap out or modify to your liking. > If you want to embrace the fragmentation in linux and make it so no dev can ever expect a consistent set of libs, NixOS is for you Indeed, NixOS is not a platform designed to serve as a ready-made target for proprietary software that wants to just make assumptions about what is present and hope for the best. But it does support Flatpak, Podman, Docker, Steam, etc., for devs that want to distribute software that targets some other such runtime instead of distributing source code. > If you want to [...] set up a custom environment [...] every time you want to run something The above is massively exaggerated, but kinda yeah. Years before I took up NixOS, I learned how to package software for a few distros and developed some tooling preferences. I realized that with some basic packaging skills, I could run any system I thought was interesting, stable, or useful and just package what is needed along the way. So when I came to NixOS, occasionally having to package things was not a big problem for me. Such users are a great fit for NixOS, and the NixOS community has a lot of them.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

> If you want to embrace the fragmentation in linux and make it so no dev can ever expect a consistent set of libs, How so? Nix gives packages whatever libs they ask for just like any distro