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.

  • Shareni
    3·
    8 months ago

    Isn’t it fully reproducible with flakes?

    • oessessnex
      11·
      8 months ago

      Nope, nix doesn’t ensure or require that the builds are deterministic. It’s not any better in that regard than other package managers.

      • Shareni
        2·
        8 months ago

        nix doesn’t ensure or require that the builds are deterministic

        Pin package version and --pure?

        That should already allow it to be ahead of other PMs.

        • oessessnex
          31·
          8 months ago

          A package is reproducible if you use the same inputs, run the build, and get the same outputs.

          The issue is that the build can produce different outputs given the same inputs. So you need to modify the build or patch the outputs. This is something that is being worked on by most distributions: https://reproducible-builds.org/who/projects/

          NixOS is not special in that regard nor are all NixOS packages reproducible.