3 ms·

I have experienced too many other benefits to NixOS (and learned enough Nix to get by along the way) to turn back now. It now seems like the only way to do Lin

I have experienced too many other benefits to NixOS (and learned enough Nix to get by along the way) to turn back now. It now seems like the only way to do Linux sanely to me. It’s perfect for tinkerers like me due to having more supported packages than any other distro, plus instant rollbacks. It would be like asking a functional programmer to go back to C. “But… I’d lose all my guarantees, and spend too much time troubleshooting crap that just would never happen in [functional language/NixOS] again… No thanks” To some things, there’s simply no turning back… and Nix is (slowly but steadily) gaining marketshare and mindshare for this reason. If the BSD’s want future relevance, they better steal some ideas from Nix quick, and get cracking with declarative immutability and deterministic builds

pdntspa 3y ago
Those things are cool... but I don't need them. I suspect many of us don't. I like BSD's simplicity, consistency, and its native integration with ZFS. I don't know about deterministic builds but I suspect it does that without making a big deal, since everything can arrive via ports. Linux, as much as I love it, is a rat's nest of different ideas and the inconsistency between distributions makes me want to pull my hair out. I care less about how it does things, and more that I only have to learn one system to understand each component -- as opposed to the mess that is init.d vs systemd vs upstart or whatever. man pages are good but the FreeBSD Handbook is better.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  > I suspect many of us don’t One thing I’ve learned after crossing the 50 year mark is that time is actually the most valuable thing we have (and, most egalitarianly, everyone starts out with more or less the same amount of it left). So while troubleshooting can be enjoyable to many, time spent troubleshooting any issue that would simply be impossible to encounter in an alternative system is expensive indeed. Consider reading this very understandable paper, which I consider at least as important as the Bitcoin paper: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

pdntspa 3y ago

Those things are cool... but I don't need them. I suspect many of us don't. I like BSD's simplicity, consistency, and its native integration with ZFS. I don't know about deterministic builds but I suspect it does that without making a big deal, since everything can arrive via ports. Linux, as much as I love it, is a rat's nest of different ideas and the inconsistency between distributions makes me want to pull my hair out. I care less about how it does things, and more that I only have to learn one system to understand each component -- as opposed to the mess that is init.d vs systemd vs upstart or whatever. man pages are good but the FreeBSD Handbook is better.

pmarreck 3y ago
> I suspect many of us don’t One thing I’ve learned after crossing the 50 year mark is that time is actually the most valuable thing we have (and, most egalitarianly, everyone starts out with more or less the same amount of it left). So while troubleshooting can be enjoyable to many, time spent troubleshooting any issue that would simply be impossible to encounter in an alternative system is expensive indeed. Consider reading this very understandable paper, which I consider at least as important as the Bitcoin paper: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf