this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I had an yearly experience with Nix, but I'm thinking that it is overhead for just a home PC system. You may have more pain with static linkage compared to benefits of Nix reproducability and flexibility. Now is a year I'm on the Fedora Silverblue and this one is a really good balance between complexity and usability.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "pain with static linkage"? If my links have broken in NixOS, it was always due to my inability / laziness to set things up correctly.
I have been using NixOS for my daily driver for about a year now, and while it has been a bit of a learning curve to set things up and heavily rewrite my dotfiles, the dependability and availability of packages has been nothing short of amazing. It feels a lot like the final destination for my distro hopping journey.
I use a lot of CLI tools and some system level hackage to get my keybindings just right, so when I tried out Silverblue I had to load in a lot of stuff through rpm-ostree, which was less than ideal. But if OP wants a rock solid system with Flatpak apps, I wholeheartedly second Silverblue.
I mean if you try to use anything like python packages or even try to build python from sources it is painful. The only way to create developer environment is to use something like
nex develop
shells and you need to care about passing to LD_LIBRARY_PATH all that you need. And nothing downloaded as a binary is not working... For example, if I'm working on a Java-maven project that includes maven-protobuf then it is not working for you because protoc binary formanylinux
is made for a dynamic linkage... Overall developer experience is painful. And anything that is not in nixpkgs you cannot just download, build from source and use: you need to pack everything into packages with resolving all the dependencies by hands...Thanks for clarifying! I can totally see where that sort of stuff can really mess things up.
My experience with development environments has been a bit better: Node works out of the box, no problem. For Ruby, the workflow took a little setting up (with bundix), but ended up working very reliably. For R, I actually enjoy that I can set up all my packages with home-manager and they get updated in my regular update cycle and it's not a separate process altogether.