I dont think thats really the goal here. NixOS is not designed to be used by your grandmother. Better Documentation would sometimes be nice though.
By the way, there already is github.com/vlinkz/nixos-conf-editor
It isn’t not the goal, either. Nix is very popular with devs for many obvious reasons, so most of the developments naturally has to do with making that an even better experience. That doesn’t mean accessibility is a non-goal; there just isn’t a great deal of motivation to work on making the operating system easy for non-devs to use.
Probably not the goal, but a NixOS-based begginer distro could be great, with one app to install all your package and one app to manage all your settings. (I personally really like the idea of having app settings in the "general" settings app). But probably the killer advantage of NixOS is that it's really hard to break and really easy to fix, which is important for a distro aimed at the general public.
It has so many interesting possible applications. Declarative and reproducible wine configurations for games and software; universal (cross-distro) packaging (without emulated runtime environments like flatpak); reproducible user environments managed easily with a GUI with trivial version control (both for config and software versions); pre-configuring a system before even setting it up (such as configuring a raspberry pi before you’ve even bought one so that once you have, you just install and configure everything in one go).
For AppImages specifically, the guy that made the tech has had a lot of controversial arguments and opinions and a general unwillingness to accept change. Things like intentionally making it so Wayland doesn’t work because he dislikes Wayland. Also dropped a PR for AppImages for things like OBS but then refused to take responsibility for making sure all the features works and maintaining it, and then throwing a fuss when the OBS maintainers ultimately decided to not move forward with it due to lack of support commitment. Dude wanted to throw all the burden on the OBS team and then proceeded of accusing them to be paid by RedHat to favor Flatpaks. Also got mad that distros stopped shipping some outdated/unmaintained libraries AppImages relies on and refuses to upgrade it. Just massive ego problems overall around his pet project that it AppImages.
MX Linux which is number 1 on Distrowatch for a reason. Much easier than installing Debian itself which needs some tweaking, and really just Debian with some extra tools, latest Firefox… The Debian 12 based version is ready and I don’t have any issues. I also run Debian set to Trixie/Sid, which is fun if you want Debian to be like a rolling release distro, but you need to enable some bug reports and know how to manage updates to not have things break on you.
Think of AppImage like a standalone executable on windows, you download it, it just works and thats good. But it doesnt get automatic updates and to get a new feature you need to download it again. Flatpaks and Snaps don’t have this issue and are more like traditional package managers.
Syncthing. I rotate different Linux operating systems daily, but all my data is synced with Syncthing between all my machines, smartphone and a server. Kind of like Chrome OS in that I can wipe or reinstall the OS and be instantly back up and running, or even install a new version of Linux to try out.
I like appimages personally.Find them useful when i have conflict of depencies in package manager.I don’t like snaps comparing to flatpak.Flatpak let u add custom repositories but not snaps ,canonical want to control from where u will install snap apps.
I recently switched to sway and I use xeyes to “look” for applications that are not running natively. The eyes only look at applications running in xwayland when you mouse over them since they can only track the cursor there.
yeah no, the oldest commit I could find is from 2003 but if you look at the first lines in the file its at least as old as 1994, probably older than that even.
One of the big benefits is there are plugins for the app stores on various distros. So it makes it just simpler. For me there are flatpaks for what i use and easy to find.
Imho flatpaks have better integrations with menus etc
Maybe around 2nd grade with the piper computer which was a small rpi based laptop that you built. I switched fully in 5th grade when my windows install broke. A few months before that I switched on my laptop when my math teacher reminded me about it. I Have rarely used windows since but for a few months I used a Mac laptop. My linux laptop (Dell xps 13 7390) I had was hidpi, kind of slow and died quickly and the m1 Mac hardware was just plain better (this was close to when the 2020 m1 Mac came out so no asahilinux). I have used pop, manjaro, arch and alpine Linux. I have been using it for a few years now and never plan on going back to windows though I do occasionally use macOS for nonfree/closed source apps. When I first switched the only game I played was Minecraft which worked just as well as windows. Now almost all the games I play are free software like Minetest and super tux kart.
I do, except I always enable minimize and maximize because it seems foolish to me to have those disabled by default. It's really smooth and whenever I have too many windows open, the overview makes it easy to find what I'm looking for. Initially I was against hiding the dock in the overview but I decided to give it a try one day and I actually ended up enjoying it not being visible.
What's funny is that I actually end up using the overview instead of alt-tab most of the time because it's faster for my workflow, and the default window switcher for apps with different windows open is BAD.
I've gotten so used to the workflow that I find myself dragging my mouse to the top left corner of the screen on Windows lol and painfully wait the extra second it takes to open the Windows overview when swiping up with three fingers on a trackpad.
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