They are very very different, much more so than say arch and mint are different. Listing what makes nix better than mint would be just a list of features mint is missing, wether these are relevant for you or not would decide if they make nix better. However there are some objective technical points that are just flat out better:
One config file describing your system. You change that file, you change the system. The system always is in the state described in that file.
Complex system changes that would require many steps are trivial since you only have to describe the outcome in your configuration file instead of how to get there. For example I can declare in the config file that I want a system using the current stable linux kernel with zen patches and Nvidia drivers that have 32 bit support.
Every update is a (seamless) reinstall. The entire system gets rebuilt as if it was a fresh install, sans your home directory and the settings you made ofc.
Concept of generations. Every time I change my config file or rebuilt my system(update) it is a new generation with its own entry in the bootloader. Btw, the config file also controls which bootloader your system uses, you can just say grub or systemd and nix takes care of the rest.
‘nix-shell -p program’ that little command will open a shell with the specified applications installed in it, after you close that shell the programs are gone. This is great for trying out apps without cluttering your system with their dependencies, or quickly using a app you know you won’t need permanently.
Choice between release based updates or bleeding edge rolling. Concept of generations does still apply, you can quickly try out the rolling release channel and if it doesn’t work out you can easily go back.
Trivial to change midstack applications. With midstack I mean things like cinnamon, gnome-shell or plasma base files. For example what if you wanted to switch from gnome to kde? A single word changed in the nix config file will rip out all of the gnome stack and put the plasma stack in instead. As if you never had gnome on your system, a reinstall for all intents and purposes. Again, trivial to change back.
Interesting read, although a bit too preachy at times.
In my opinion, this is a utopian point of view that does not work in real life and glances over a lot of good things of GPL.
Linux and a lot of open source would not be here today, in this shape, without big companies using it for their commercialized software. You really think Microsoft would contribute to Linux source code if it can not use it commercially? You really think ANY company would contribute to ANYTHING if they can not commercialize it?
Linux is what it is today because not only volunteers, but companies depend on it being stable and feature-full. If companies did not care to contribute to it, it would be dead and only a pet project of few volunteers.
Who would pay all these people to work on it? Sure, some of them would work for free as a hobby, some of them coud get paid from donations. But its nowhere near enough to make Linux or any other FOSS project big and popular.
Until people need money to survive, AGPL will never be the most popular license and it should not if you want to have FOSS.
And what is so bad about it? You still have base open source code that they use to make their software, make your own. You are mad because companies take open source code, and charge for it. Then, you take it and make the software free.
You want everybody to use FOSS, sure. Who will be customer support? Who will fix and be responsible for stuff when they dont work? How will you pay these people?
Free as in, free to do whatever the fuck you want with it. Not free as in free to do whatever you want, except make money to survive.
The problems you describe are due to capitalism: profit motivated commerce. The open source business model has a focus that monetizes the human actions that are a value-add, such as continued development of targeted features, tech support and other things it makes sense to pay for specialized knowledge, but the tangibles are still open for all to modify, audit or use as they want.
Damn, all this nix hype has me wanting to jump off of my Kinoite install. Maybe it’s time to dust off my old nix config I’ve tucked away. Found a new Youtube sub too. Thanks OP!
I keep seeing trends with Linux distribution like teenager looking for new fashion.
I think it’s mostly the very young Linux user who hope from one distribution to the another over and over whereas many just stick with what they got : Ubuntu, Debian, mint, maybe fedora.
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.
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