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More specifically, issues for one distro (or maybe family of distros if applicable) and not other distros.

I'll start: NixOS. I love how I can have my whole operating system configuration defined deterministically with configuration files, but what I believe is a serious flaw, is when you choose the "unstable" channel, the channel for receiving the latest packages rather than ones up to 6 months old: stable. Unstable package often build dependencies on device, and I've often faced build failures, why are new package versions given if they fail to build?!

Why can't Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so, but I can't think of any other distros that have this problem: where installing a new package version that came out a few days or even a week ago, has a chance of failing after its made available in the distro's official package manager.

There are a handful of workarounds for your NixOS configuration in this case, but it happens too often for me and I shouldn't have to edit my config for to work around it.

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[-] twkm@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

Choice? I don't use one but that's due to never exposing ports that don't need to be. Some that do that would still want one to provide "belt and suspenders". Others want a specific one vs another primarily due to the software they use, that others do not. Given how trivial it is to install one does it really matter? I'm fine if they do as long as it is easy to remove, i.e., not a critical system/global dependency. I always install and remove some anyway, don't you?

this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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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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