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It is pretty easy to use as a end user installing packages is no harder then other distributions. It does not have as wide of a selection as Debian, but I have
by davorak 12y ago
It is pretty easy to use as a end user installing packages is no harder then other distributions. It does not have as wide of a selection as Debian, but I have found it easier to use their packaging system.
The packaging system is very friendly to beginners since it is straight forward to experiment with writing new packages installing them and then reverting if it does not work quite right. Or even better switching to a different profile with a different set of packages installed and coming back to your experiment later.
> How easy is it to break?
In the sense that the packages start conflicting with each other? The packages that come with nixpkgs rarely if every caused a conflict with other packages in nixpkgs. When they do I can simply roll back and make changes to the package.
If you explicitly mount the read only /nix/store as read/write and alter packages manually you can cause yourself some trouble, but it is something that is explicitly marked as dangerous and nearly unnecessary.
- mtdewcmu 12y agoBack when I had debian on my home machine (a number of years ago), I experienced that dpkg would gradually lose track of the state of the system and become less and less useful over time. Once things got incoherent, there was no putting it back together, and it seemed inevitable after so many upgrades. I don't recall specifics, and I don't want to dwell on it, but just to illustrate how these things are predisposed to experience a kind of entropy death. This one seems to be solving the right problems. But I hope they didn't get too carried away with solving the problem of being functional... that's not a real problem.
- davorak 12y ago> I experienced that dpkg would gradually lose track of the state of the system and become less and less useful over time. Similar experience with ubuntu and upgrading to different versions was my motivation to use nix. It was made worse by my efforts to install cutting edge versions of numpy and scipy at the time. > But I hope they didn't get too carried away with solving the problem of being functional... that's not a real problem. Heh, they are practical bunch, well at least good chunks of nix, nixos, hydra are written in perl and nixops is written in python. I think the main argument for the former was they all knew perl at the time and want to make sure it was reasonable to port to several systems including cygwin on windows thought it is no longer has tier one support.