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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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If you know about NixOS, then you probably know this, but Nix, the package manager/the language behind NixOS, is cross-platform.
I daily drive NixOS, but I also use Nix (and home-manager) on my Fedora music laptop, my Ubuntu home file-server, and my work Windows machine (WSL) to install and configure neovim automatically instead of copying a config, installing all the packages, and running check health over and over again until everything is set up.
I just copy my neovim.nix file over (also other things like zsh.nix) and run
home-manager switchYou don't have to use NixOS to take advantage of its benefits.
It always seemed to me like Nix package manager is not "native" enough or there are some downsides compared to dnf or apt. If that's not the case I think I've got my answer.
From an outsider perspective (I haven't used Nix at all), the downsides I see are that it's extra software on top of the defaults for any given distro, it's not optimized for the distro (meaning it might pull in dependencies that already exist or not use distro specific APIs/libs), and it doesn't adhere to the motivations of the distro (e.g. not adhering to the DFSGs for Debian).
And of course, most of the packages are community maintained and there's the immutability, which might be a hinderance to some use cases, but not for me.
All in all, not really the worst if you're not worried about space or getting the absolute most in performance and not an ideologue, but it's enough to make me stick with APT. I chose Debian because of its commitment to FOSS, not the stability nor performance.