Veraticus

I’ve run into this in Debian. Not sure what to tell you – the base repo does not have an explicit contract that everything in it uses the same version of all available software.

Not really; they will try to automatically download dependencies, but they don’t provide the application with resolution to the correct dependency. So upgrading libssl for one dependency could still break another.

It benefits the end-user.

People do not want to be in dependency resolution hell; where they have three programs that all use different versions of libssl and require them to install all of them properly and point each application to the correct one. Most users have no ability to resolve problems like that. By not bundling, the application developer is forcing them to either try anyway or just not install their software.

Bundling dependencies with Flatpak or Snap helps the end user at the cost of only a few extra megabytes of space, which most users have in abundance anyway.

Is it actually truly the year of the Linux desktop?

This is overall very true but the transition even for Apple was anything but smooth. There was a long period of time during which app support for ARM was pretty hit or miss. Happily that period is just about over and now everything is built for all archs.

So they can inject their versions with malware.

I switched to Windows for gaming this year. With advances in Wine/Proton it was super easy; there’s nothing I play that isn’t perfectly convertible to Linux anymore.

Even using an Nvidia card in my desktop seems fine.

I didn’t find it more unstable or bleeding edge than anything else. All upgrades had to be tested and scripted anyway so the process for upgrading stuff was basically the same as any other distro. I honestly never ran into any of the problems people talked about here.

As for why it was chosen, the person in charge liked it and used it personally.

I’m a devops professional, not IT. I’ve managed thousands of servers both in-cloud and in-datacenter. That includes Arch servers managed via Chef.

Now you’ve heard about it.

You’re probably looking for Linux From Scratch. Just so you know, it is quite a commitment. But if that’s your bag it’s also a lot of fun.

There’s nothing inherently superior, just what people like more. If you want to use Mint that’s totally fine and valid.

I never ran into this so I don’t really know what you’re talking about

Ubuntu, RedHat, AWS Linux, Arch. Honestly distros in production are pretty similar since they’re all headless and pretty pared-down. If you just know the logistics of a few package managers and init systems you’ll be good.

You’ve basically identified the advantages and disadvantages of Nix properly.

When you learn Nix and how it works, it is incredibly powerful. Being able to version your entire OS with one configuration is incredible. Old software that messes things up just doesn’t exist. It’s easy to explore new software, configurations, and upgrades and roll back to your old state seamlessly. No more “well I deleted an environment variable and now my performance is 50% worse and I don’t even remember what that environment variable was named or where it should live.” With Nix, you can switch from i3 to Hyprland, try it out for a day, and then switch back to your old configuration seamlessly and easily.

The disadvantages are that you need to know Nix (the programming language and configuration file syntax) to do it, and they are complicated. Worth it in my opinion but it’s not easy.

Every other distro is basically different from Nix because of this, as you will be configuring them manually to a greater or lesser extent. I find that manual configuration to be annoying and I always had to create tools to help version my configs properly before Nix. But it is certainly easier to do since you just have to understand the software you’re installing and how to configure it. In Nix, you have to understand both that, and Nix.

I think it’s totally worth it. But only you can make that call for you.

I switched because of Bejeweled ads in the Start menu, honestly.

Derivations are kinda complicated but you can definitely get them if you try! There’s nothing super magical about them. As opposed to the rest of Nix which can feel extremely and unfortunately magical…

I do infrastructure stuff professionally and wanted to not manage that at home so just went for a Synology.

Just depends on how DIY you wanna go. I’ve had my Synology for years and it’s needed zero ongoing maintenance and has never had any problems so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

Most derivations are pretty flexible; the ones that aren’t, however, will require you to write your own overlay to fix them. Or just fork them entirely. This is one of the advantages in Nix in that you can create reproducibility at any granularity. Writing and using your own derivation is complex though. Most packages provide more than enough knobs to change their configuration on their own in my experience though — my current Nix build uses no derivations I had to write myself.

Home Manager and Nix itself are versioned so I don’t understand your complaint about config changing. If you’re happy with how your system works just don’t update it to a newer version. If you do, as in any other software, you risk breakage. The advantage of Nix in this scenario obviously is that rolling back in the case of an upgrade going wrong is incredibly trivial.

I run Nix, Wayland, and Hyprland on Nvidia and it works totally fine for gaming.

It’s basically alt-right spam. Lots of Breitbart links, right-wing culture war mouthpieces and memes, etc.