For me, it was much like iPhone vs Android. I’ve twice been back to owning an iPhone and have kept leaving because of the more closed ecosystem. The freedom to explore, take apart, modify, hack, learn, etc. I don’t do a lot of that, but it is nice to try things out. So in summary for me its the philosophy behind it.
I’d been tinkering with Linux for years and never using it properly when I saw how Windows Vista performed on my new fairly high end PC and formatted and installed Ubuntu and never looked back. Of course it wasn’t an entirely smooth experience, setting up X properly was fun in those days but the performance was so much better.
You can make your computer your own. You bought it, you deserve control for it, you do not need a corporation to decide things for you.
The benefits of Linux is that you can simply multitask much better, and do things more efficiently. It’s honestly not the same and the two are just not comparable, but not everyone can appreciate or take advantage of that.
For an inexperienced person to set it up, of course it’s not that simple. Those that are comfortable with Windows find all of these benefits trivial over the perceived amount of effort to transition.
For an experienced person like me, Windows is much more of a nuisance to set up. I really like my setups clean, I just can’t stand how dirty Windows gets. To clean your system effectively, you’d have to reformat it. There are things like Scoop, MSYS, Docker, etc. I had to use Windows on my laptop for school. The way I use Windows is like how I use Linux, except Powershell commands are just non-intuitive. It just feels really awkward over Bash.
The things I was using my computer to do were becoming increasingly technical - I work in science, and I’m also a massive nerd outside of that. Many of the programs I was using were on both Windows and Linux, but often I was unable to find troubleshooting help for the Windows versions. I knew enough of Linux that I could jiggle things around and make the Linux advice fit into my Windows situation, but it was awkward and added another layer of uncertainty to the stressful troubleshooting.
At a certain point, it felt like a case of “you can’t find Windows specific advice because who in their right mind would actually be using Windows to do this stuff?”
Who indeed
(That last part is hyperbolic, but it sort of does feel like I was trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver sometimes. Combine that with Windows being annoying and stressful in the personal use context too and I wasn’t having a good time. Things got very messy.
The way NixOS is, the initial setup of all the different things you would want is incredibly time consuming and it has a very very steep learning curve. It was incredibly difficult for me to set everything up. I tried to make it work and then ran away 4 times now, each time starting from the configuration I’ve had so far, and building up on it. I still haven’t been able to perfect my configuration, and I’ve been on NixOS (this time) since mid-June. I haven’t been working on it actively, but I have done some work on it. NixOS is just too complex and too much for me to wrap my head around. Personally, I’m leaving it for something else, I’m thinking of Void, and I might go back to Arch for a while, I don’t know. Fedora seemed promising, but after the recent telemetry stuff, I crossed it off my list. Tumbleweed seems alright? I’ll see. But I totally get it.
I too think that NixOS is amazing. It is really unique (Guix is similar but not quite) yet it is very difficult to learn and maintain properly.
The main problem with NixOS right now is, in my opinion, the scattered documentation. You often can’t understand a topic without cross-referencing the manual, nixos wiki, nixos search (and nixpkgs and some scattered personal blogs if you’re really unlucky). But if you stick around and adapt to this it’s very easy to do stuff that takes a lot of effort on other distros with a few lines in your config.
While we’re on the topic: What’s a great resource to learn about flakes? I can’t seem to find a great answer that also shows why they are better and when.
They’re still unstable and fully optional. When you’re at the point where you could benefit from flakes, you’ll know it. Ignore them for now.
The most tangible difference to a NixOS user would be that they replace channels. If you’re contempt with channels, no need to rush to flakes.
Hey, sorry for the late reply. I found the blog by xiaoso quite good, and this one also isn’t too bad. But I never found one true source which explained it satisfactorily to me. It’s probably best if you just browse through other people’s configuration and piece it all together from that. From what I understood, flakes have 3 main uses:
They replace nix channels. If you want to switch between stable and unstable it’s pretty easy to do through flakes. Also, if you need any modules (like home manager or agenix, for encrypting secrets) you can simply import it as an import for your flake.
You can “modularize” your configuration. You can describe multiple systems in a single flake so you can have your desktop and laptop be built from the same flake, but with different packages installed. This is the part that I use most and honestly find most useful.
You can quickly have a development environemnt through flakes. You could use a flake per project, have all your dependencies as inputs in your dev flakes and never clutter your system with various dev tools
Nixos is riddled with stuff that you just “have to know” which can be quite frustrating. The lon ger you stick with it, the easier it gets though.
I’m personally very happy with tumbleweed. It’s been very stable, and has the built in rollback feature on the off chance an update played bad with your system (I’ve only needed to use it two or three times over the last few years across three different computers). Tumbleweed also integrates super well with plasma.
Ooh if you’re thinking of trying something new I recommend Alpine. An extremely underrated distro for a DIYer. It’s really lightweight and simple and its packaging system is a breeze to write packages for (for things you’d usually use the AUR for, since there isn’t an equivalant for Alpine AFAIK). Void is also fun I ran that for a year. Keep in mind, I’m only talking fun. For a good distro that will Just Work™, Alpine is fine, but I think Arch wins on that front.
NixOS is a journey and I have the privelage of having two systems, one “Home” system running Arch that I use usually and my “Roaming” system which I run whatever and is what I take to class and stuff because usually I only use it to take notes meaning minimum requirement is “Be able to log into a tty so I can write a text file”. So being able to use that for NixOS has helped a lot, since if something goes wrong, I can just ssh into my “Home” machine to get work done.
You certainly want to test out what you expect to use before moving. The advantage would also be finding apps that run natively on Linux. There certainly are some such DAW apps.
I’m using Manjaro KDE and my games are running fine under Proton on Steam Games. But I play Snowrunner, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc.
A tip on Windows VMs as I do keep one. I discovered that running one with it’s Windows files rather on a separate partition formatted at NTFS, really works quite well for me (versus the VM sitting on one massive VM file on the Linux partition. Can see Chris’ video about this at youtu.be/6KqqNsnkDlQ.
Nice thing for just testing Linux, is install it on an external drive, and boot with that. Then your existing machine is completely left as it is, and you can test Linux as it would really run on your computer.
Thanks a lot for the Hint about the vm solution, i will defenitely Look further into it. The only problem with actually running Linux on my Hardware i can think of would be secure Boot. But this can be turned off (i needed it for Windows 11 and some docker stuff i played around with). Years ago i had a dual Boot solution with win 7 and Ubuntu. But in the end i was more on Windows (gaming on Linux was way worse bock then) and eventually kicked Ubuntu off my harddrive.
It isnt even that i have actual Problems with win11, in fact i have to say it runs well and very stable, at least on my System. Its more like an “ideological” Thing. I just want to have As little big corpo stuff as possible.
Why did I switch to Linux ? I pushed Windows XP as far as it could go (skipped Vista altogether), and after that I became so frustrated with Windows 7 being so bad that I switched to Linux and never looked back since.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s usefull for others. Write it for yourself and learn from it. I myself wrote copying script for terminal and I am sure no one else going to use it just me and thats fine.
It would be easier for me to understand if you can explain how this is different from the various other methods of installing software onto a computer.
How is this different from a package manager, or something like FlatPak or AppImage, where you can find scripts (not necessarily bash scripts) to install whole packages from a binary repository?
Is there an advantage to your solution over something like OhMyZsh, which provides a repository of Zsh functions you can install to configure the Zsh user interface.
Is there a reason why, if someone does not want to use a package manager, or Nix/Guix, they would prefer to use your solution rather than just go to the website and find the script there to install the software they need?
it isn’t platform specific because you can add scripts for any distro or architecture.
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it just stores and runs bash scripts to install stuff
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to remove once installed, or automated ways to update.
Well, any Linux distro has a package manager which you can use to install, update, or remove software. So can Nix, Guix, AppImage, and FlatPak. And Nix and Guix allows you to build from source code.
So I guess my question is, if I were thinking about using your app to install software, and update and remove it, how is it more convenient than using my ordinary package manager? If it is more convenient for building software from source, how is it more convenient than Nix or Guix?
Appimages are like MacOS .app programs. You download a random executable from a random website, that contains everything it needs to run. It’s the antithesis of the Linux way. Great for portability, awful for everything else. There are no automatic updates unless the developer explicitly bothers to implement them.
Snaps are like docker containers. Each snap also contains everything it needs to run, but at least there is a centralized update system.
Flatpaks are like another package manager layered over your OS. It manages its own dependency system isolated from your main dependency management. It updates its stuff pretty much like apt/dnf/pacman.
Native are managed through your distro’s package manager, obviously.
From a feature/version point of view:
If you have a bleeding edge or quickly moving distro, native packages are fine if you want/need up to date software. Arch users shouldn’t need Flatpaks for example. The downside is that those packages are made by the distro’s maintainers so can be anywhere from untested pre-release software (happened in Manjaro) to extremely outdated (like in Debian oldstable).
Flatpaks/Snaps/Appimages are more and more maintained and packaged by their developers. It’s great for them as you only need to package once, all bug reports are on versions you control, and you don’t need to depend on a distro’s maintainer time and will to push updates to users. For stable distros users, this is theoretically the best of both worlds: a stable, tested OS with up to date user facing applications.
From a philosophical point of view:
Appimages and Flatpaks are fully FOSS. Flathub is the dominant ways of distributing Flatpaks but anyone can create a competitor.
Snaps are distributed through Canonical’s Snap Store, which is not FOSS and is vulnerable to Canonical’s corporate meddling.
My personal preference:
Flatpaks for GUI apps, native for CLI tools
Appimages as a last resort if it’s the only way to get a specific app.
When I was 5/6 years old, I loved computers, but I wasn’t necessarily a hobbyist. I learned almost everything on my own. I used to heavily modify my Windows desktop back then with skins and Stardock programs to make my desktop look like Mac OS X. I was a big fan of Apple’s user interface (iOS/iPad as well, both the skeuomorphism and, well, the flat design a little bit).
So when I was 9, I saw Linux. I decided to use wubi and Ubuntu, tried this brand new OS.
It was awesome. I could modify it as I wanted to. I slept on my primary school classes. Ricing at the time felt great, you had so much control over your own desktop.
I have no idea why I stopped at that point. I think Windows 8 looked cool enough to me, but now I think it’s one of the worst OS I’ve ever used. But games just worked there, honestly. Linux felt more like a toy, while Windows was my comfort zone.
Eventually a few years away from a decade later, I did use Debian 7 for hosting stuff like my bots in GCP. Having used Linux to customize the DE and the exposure to the terminal really helped a lot in making things more familiar to me.
Then I thought why don’t I just use Linux desktop again. I started distro hopping. I finally found home in KDE Arch Linux, Proton-GE, the AUR, and Arch Wiki. I rarely do ricing if at all, only because I finally found the setup I’d rather be comfortable with than changing it frequently for no good reason.
I still use W11 to this day on my laptop but only because of school requiring me to use Visual Studio among other things. That’s where Docker, WSL2, scoop, MSYS2, and several open source projects to improve QOL comes in. I can be comfortable with Windows and continue to use Linux without any annoying differences in my workflow. I also just use Vim on everything, and the CLI when I want to do productive work.
I’ve rarely held my mouse on the computer and neither did I work hard to memorize anything. You’d start getting intuitive with everything the moment you start to try understanding the rationale of how stuff is designed to be.
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