If you've hung out in Linux enthusiast circles lately, you'll have heard whispers that Arch Linux is no longer hot product. Instead, all the cool kids are using something called NixOS. Since I bricked my Debian setup in an unfortunate accident involving compiling from source, I decided to give NixOS …

Hey all, thought this might be of interest to some here.

Wrote about why I moved from NixOS to Ubuntu after using it for several months on my daily driver. Suspect that this take is likely to be kind of controversial and court claims of skill issues, which might even be true.

Let me know what you think.

  • fd93OP
    4·
    7 months ago

    I actually can’t remember as it would have been 6+ months ago now. The issue is probably fixed already by the Debian maintainers / Elementary Team / both.

    Likely something with Meson build / apt not playing nicely.

    • suy
      8·
      7 months ago

      I’ve been compiling apps depending on newer Qt and/or kdelibs versions for ages (back when the repository was literally called “kdelibs”, about 20 years ago).

      This has never been an issue for me. Even with autoconf/automake, I just compiled everything to its own prefix, so it doesn’t interfere with the system at all. You don’t even need to fix the build system in the cases where it’s broken/lacks features, if you leverage all the “path” variables (CPATH, LIBRARY_PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc.). But autotools, cmake, qmake, and every build system I’ve used so far supports this out of the box.

      Not claiming it’s a skill issue, but I have to say I’m very surprised by reading any of this.

      Specifically, for Debian, I was told 20 years ago by a very wise person “you never do make install on Debian, specially not for the kernel”, and taught me how to use make-kpkg (or something like that, I don’t remember the name of the tool), which was a way to make a debian package of a self built kernel, which is obviously something that can’t be installed to its own prefix.