NixOS 19.09 Released With Xfce 4.14 Packages, GNOME 3 Updates

[starshipeleven]

I don't have anything against systemd, I just think competition in the init space is good for everyone.

Wrong, that's a core component of the OS, the less options there are in the "base" the better.

With more options you force developers to support many different APIs and components.

[Michael_S]

Wrong, that's a core component of the OS, the less options there are in the "base" the better.

With more options you force developers to support many different APIs and components.

You're probably right. I'm not trying to start another fight over this - I have systemd on the three Linux computers in my house and it's on all of the hundreds of servers we have at work without problems.

GNU Shepherd is the least important nice feature of Guix. More importantly, I forgot to mention the most important feature of Guix: the developers have been taking all of the work the Debian project has been doing on reproducible builds and adding onto it. I think it's an awesome goal.

[starshipeleven]

You're probably right. I'm not trying to start another fight over this

Note that I'm not saying "systemd should be the only one".
While I'm a supporter of systemd, my statement is not related to what is chosen as standard. Any single standard for a core component is better than 3-4 competing ones, and that's a fact.

Last example of what I'm saying is the Debian situation with their ongoing effort at supporting more than a single init system https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...rsity-Question

[blackiwid]

Well they have buildin revert / versionsystem like the "git" of linux distributions.

But they have problems some technically some organisationally. I think they have no real staff/members, if you report a bug don't expect it to get fixed. It can take them months or they fix it never, and I got the statement, that if I want a fix why I don't send a patch, and that after I think 3 months I did a bump, to ask if anytime it get fixed.

Also their documentation is horrible. You have to look in their source to maybe get a idea what to do. You basically must understand 100% of their code or you can't use the distro to oversimplify it a bit.

And then this horrible language they use. It has no similarity to any other language I am aware of. It's not beef and not fish, it's a bastard between a configuration file language and a strange programming language.

And their containers are not mainstream ready imho, because one big advantage of containers is that you can update them separately but with their declarative containers you can't do it or maybe you can, but it's not documented at all.

Then their ways of communicating, in irc you aperently find nobody that is able to answer simple questions or can ask you the right questions to fix a problem or find a workaround, on github they have bugs open for several months with sometimes no answers, and their mailinglists are also not active or alive. So you have to use apparently discourse to get any help.

It's just a bad mixture if you give no good support and have a programming language that's so weird that you would study it for at least 1 week if not a month to understand it.

Guix on the other hand has big technical problems no support for lvm (at least as boot / root device) no way of installing the normal kernel so with a average thinkpad you can't use wlan without changing hardware (intel chip). And that's are only the major problems had a list of 5-6 things, as example I have a separate hwdb udev file for my keyboard on that laptop because it don't uses systemd it also don't uses udev but I think eudev and there is no option to inject that file like there is in nixos.

And even their container system seems even worse than the one from nixos, because you only can have no network or just share the normal network, can't have a container with a own openvpn connection only inside that.

Some of that problems (especially with the ignored bugs) you can manage by booting old versions or reverting but they have even regressions on the same channels (versions of the distro).

I hope one of this step up their game eventually somehow, the concept is great but the execution on both sides is lacking.

[andrea76]

Tried to install on my home PC. I've found two problems:

• Firefox isn't updated to last version;
• My printer is not supported (Epson Workforce WF 2100) and neither the included scanner