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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

    Nixpkgs are the most up to date of any package respiratory source

    It is likely that you were using the current ‘stable’ channel that does not have the very latest packages. The ‘unstable’ channel does have the very latest packages and is what I think most people use.

    nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don’t really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I’ll def be playing with it again.

    I totally agree, I wish it was easier to learn.








  • object oriented

    Python does have OOP but you are not at all forced to use it. You can write code in a functional or even procedural style.

    typing

    I do hate that python doesent have proper support for typing but I think weakly typed variables will actually help beginners as it is less to think about to start off with.

    indentation

    I think there are pros and cons here. In other languages it is considered good style to use indentation anyway.

    I’m sure it is difficult to teach a large class like that though. It was hard enough for me to learn with a much more favourable teacher to student ratio than you probably have. Sorry but honestly I do sympathise with admin as well.



  • NixOS:

    • Largest and most up to date package repository (no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect)
    • Reproducible
    • Declarative
    • Rollbacks you can select at boot time
    • No dependency conflicts

    I think it will easily be the number 1 distro if/when they can :

    • the steep learning curve (e.g. have a gui installer EDIT: As in a GUI software centre)
    • documentation
    • have more tools use nixos and have nixos in mind (e.g. there are a couple of tools that didn’t work for me because of specific C libraries not beeing present/configured on nixos that are present on other distros. some libraries implicitly expect these to be present).



  • I have definitely found it challenging at times to do even simple things. I think it does get easier over time.

    I really hope the new user experience will improve. Once the issues with flakes are fixed and they are no longer experimental I would expect flakes to replace the other ways of doing things. This will hopefully make the documentation more concise/focused/better. It might also mean more people start using nix/flakes which will surface more of these problems to be fixed.

    I think people need to decide if the benefits they are getting are worth the challenges. I personally really like the reproducibility and the massive amount of packages available from one place. On other distros I have used things have ended up breaking eventually and I have had to re-install things and search for fixes. But on NixOs things keep working.