It's insanely stable but you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software or making little tweaks. I played with it for hours the other day and I'm just too dumb to figure it out lol I think it's just a super stable highly customizable distro for power users and a lot of people like that. If you can get over the learning curve it's a pretty powerful and unique os
It’s kind of funny because I’d put NixOS on a complete newbies computer for sure, and recommend it to an expert… But I’m less sure if I’d tell a random mid-intermediate Linux user to switch.
Like if Grandma wants Linux on their computer to do some internet browsing for some reason… I’d absolutely put NixOS on it because it’s easy to manage the system for them… But somebody who is a little familiar with Linux already might be more confused about the differences. It’s kind of the ultimate beginner distro and the ultimate power-user distro, but a bit awkward between those extremes, haha.
To get it out of the way first: There are no financial issues. There are more than enough funds to continue operations as they are for a sufficiently long time.
What is actually happening is that a long time sponsor has indicated that they (understandably) no longer want to foot the huge bill of hosting the entire archive of binary caches ($9000/mo). Finding a more sustainable setup is what the community is currently concerned with.
There is no risk of operations shutting down any time soon, the NixOS foundation has funds set aside to continue even this unsustainable setup for at least a year. We just want to be more efficient with our and others resources going forwards.
That’s what all this you might have heard of is about.
Btw, even if the binary cache were to go poof, we don’t technically need it. NixOS is a source-based distro like Gentoo and source hosting is not a concern. The binary cache is immensely helpful though which is why we’d obviously prefer to keep it.
You aren’t a reputable public hoster with AWS-class uptime. That has a price too. AWS is likely overpriced though, hence the nix community still looking for better alternatives.
Glancing over the website, I thought it’s an immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue. I could imagine that it might be cool to use with Ansible and stuff. But for an average user? I can’t really see the advantages in respect to the work you have to put in.
NixOS is not immutable in the way Fodora Silverblue is, and way more declarative and reproducible than Ansible. But yeah it is not something you “need”. Other distros work too, but NixOS is way more fun.
Because it’s the latest Cool Nerd Thing™ like Arch before it, and Gentoo before that. Most of the people raving about it probably don’t have much use for its features.
The features themselves are very useful for basically any user. Whether they are worth the non-standardness and issues that come with it is another question.
I was using LibreOffice on everything but for some unknown reason it just flat out stopped working on my machine so I installed OnlyOffice and honestly I much prefer it.
What makes you prefer OnlyOffice over LibreOffice? I like how OnlyOffice seems to decrease possible format errors, so I tend to open docs in it after putting them together in Libre.
Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can’t recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.
Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don’t get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it’s possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.
I think that if one wants “Arch with an installer” they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.
Sure. When it comes to updates, Manjaro is pretty much doing what every single other distro is doing. Updates that are buggy don’t get pushed to the stable branch until they’re fixed up, and security updates tend to get pushed through faster than feature updates. The time period that updates get held up by is not a fixed duration, it depends on the specific package and update and can be anywhere between a few days and a few weeks.
As a concrete example, with some major Plasma updates Manjaro has waited for three or even four point releases (4 / 8 weeks) before considering it stable enough vs the newest point release of the previous major release, and following point releases after that get pushed to stable much faster.
As another point, even Arch has a very similar process… Their policy on pushing updates is far more geared towards pushing updates quickly than towards not breaking things, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.
Manjaro packages start their lives in the unstable branch. Once they are a deemed stable, they are moved to the testing branch, where more tests will be realized to ensure the package is ready to be submitted to the stable branch
However, Valve notes the fact that enabling hardware acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs may cause X11 to crash. As such, hardware acceleration will be disabled by default for NVIDIA systems. In addition, Valve says that DPI scaling may not work correctly when hardware acceleration is disabled.
What happened to Nvidia open sourcing their graphics driver last year? It seems like nothing came out of it. I know the userland is still closed, but wasn't there an effort to include the driver in Mesa?
I’m not too sure, but I wish there was more action from the code being open sourced. I remember reading a little while back some newer code was leaked for NVIDIA as well, but pretty much the similar issue as there hasn’t been too much done with the info as far as I know.
I’ll take it! Was experimenting with Wayland on Plasma yesterday on my 1080 TI. Still a bit glitchy. Some issues with wine (although it might be Plasma related). But it seems like slowly getting better. I’ll check it out with the new drivers once they are on Fedora and see what happens.
No, they won’t. The community-driven KDE team at Fedora plans to drop the X11 session but that’s not a Red Hat thing. Fedora will support X11 for the time being. No plans to drop any of the many other X11 desktops at all.
Little late to the party, but I’ll chime in. I have a 3080, and for the most part, Wayland works, but there are a few problems that keep me from using it as a daily driver. G-Sync doesn’t work at all, and when I put my PC to sleep, upon wake I end up needing to do a full reboot because of severe graphical issues. When it is running though, it’s pretty smooth, with only a few graphical issues here and there. I still daily drive X11 though until the major bugs are fixed.
That is exactly why I choose to use FOSS including Linux. As much as I want to standby this principle, I have come to a breaking point after dealing with its issues, issues we have all experienced. I believe it is hands down the best choice for server use, but for work and productivity, I need something more matured that is going to work out of the box. I am glad that the community here took this criticism well but I think it’s important to discuss and understand that there are still some strides to be made. But at the end of the day, I’m just some guy ranting and who knows, maybe I’ll be installing a Linux distro after a month of using Mac OS.
This summer I use Linux on my desktop for 25 years. What do you think the first years looked like? My first laptop took me 3 weeks to get it properly installed with Suse back in 1998. For the last 10 years installing and configuring whatever distro is a piece of cake. Ofcourse soms things are not as you want them to be: the good thing is you can change everything in FOSS, and if it does not excist you can create it. People complaining at Linux Desktop are realy complaining on their own limitations. Don’t complain! Not about yourself. Not about the Linux Desktop. Never ever give up! Make your list of whats not working for you. And than work and change until your list is history. Keep your head up strong. You’ll never walk alone!
Same story, same tips, but I started with SuSE Linux 4.3 in 1996. Just try stuff, read the error messages, read docs and ask. A lot of peaople who know stuff are happy to help out of altruism or the chance to show off. ;-)
You can kinda make it bend a bit to your whim. While it is technically immutable if you don’t mess with it, it does have everything necessary for using pacman. It just all reverts next time steamos updates. Anything you install directly through the discover portal is permanent, but it does technically have access to anything in the pacman repos as well.
I unlocked mine long enough to download neofetch and take the screenshot for this. It’ll revert back soon, but I only needed it temporarily for imaginary internet points. :)
My laptop is my oldest install, running Ubunutu. Started out on 14.04 and I’ve been updating ever since. My desktop runs Arch, although it used to be Antergos. I kinda convinced it to be Arch after Antergos died so I kept getting updates. Finally I’m currently trying Fedora on my secondary PC filled with old hardware from previous builds.
Honestly, out of these I personally like Fedora most currently. It seems to have up-to-date enough packages and seems quite stable. The AUR on Arch is a powerful thing, but it can also be quite hit or miss. While Ubuntu was fine as a first distro, I don’t really like how outdated all the packages are. I’ve had quite a few cases where packages where more than a year out of date.
Currently… Slackware on main laptop. Slint (Slackware-based) on mini-pc. MX Linux (fvwm respin), Void, and OpenBSD on old laptop. NsCDE is desktop on all except MX.
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