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Why I Left NixOS for Ubuntu
(fd93.me)
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this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Makes sense. NixOS isn't for everybody and that's fine.
For people like me who don't change things on the regular, it's fine. But using the latest and greatest or having to customise stuff is really a drag. Getting a new electron app on nixpkgs can take a long time because doing it yourself is pain. It's easier to hope somebody else will deal with that pain.
Have fun on Ubuntu.
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I run nix unstable, so I get all the latest software. It's actually been very stable for me, and I love knowing I can rollback at any time if something happens to break.
By latest and greatest I meant stuff not packaged in nixpkgs yet.
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I know it's not for everyone, but creating your own nix derivation for software that doesn't exist yet on nixpikgs is not terribly difficult (for most things).
It varies wildly, in my experience. A binary package in nix? For sure, easy. Any programming language with its own ecosystem: good luck. Python, JS, and anything electron is hilariously difficult to package when anything goes wrong. If it doesn't work at the 5th try, gotta get ready for a long night.
Even C/C++ projects that should "just work" with
mkDerivationare far from trivial, but that's also due to how shit the ecosystems of those languages are. "have A,B,C installed on ubuntu 18.04" and then you find out that there are actually a bunch more dependencies, or gcc is too recent, or you have to mess with theLD_LIBRARY_PATH, or or or or.There have been very, very few packages that I found trivial to package. nix is very good at exposing hidden dependencies.
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