NixOS 20.03 Released Atop Linux 5.4, Various Desktop/Display Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NixOS 20.03 Released Atop Linux 5.4, Various Desktop/Display Improvements

NixOS 20.03 has been released as the newest version of this Linux distribution built atop the Nix package manager...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NixOS-20.03-Released

[skeevy420]

Nice. This is one of those distributions I've always wanted to use but never got around to actually ever using it. I'm surprised at that because, looking at their documentation and random forum posts, it seems like it's the perfect distribution for me and how I want to use my system.

[OpenSourceAnarchist]

Nice. This is one of those distributions I've always wanted to use but never got around to actually ever using it. I'm surprised at that because, looking at their documentation and random forum posts, it seems like it's the perfect distribution for me and how I want to use my system.

NixOS is fascinating, and it is possible to have an extremely customized and fully-reproducible configuration in just a few hours of reading over the manual and "pills." Unless it has changed significantly in the last year, I will caution anyone who wants to try to use NixOS like Gentoo, in terms of compiling all packages with optimized CFLAGS and micromanaging USE flags, that it is really not worth the effort. That was my mistake as when I saw NixOS, I thought it could rival Gentoo's extreme flexibility, especially given its unique claim to true package stability. Still a great distribution, but only learn to do things the Nix way™.

[skeevy420]

NixOS is fascinating, and it is possible to have an extremely customized and fully-reproducible configuration in just a few hours of reading over the manual and "pills." Unless it has changed significantly in the last year, I will caution anyone who wants to try to use NixOS like Gentoo, in terms of compiling all packages with optimized CFLAGS and micromanaging USE flags, that it is really not worth the effort. That was my mistake as when I saw NixOS, I thought it could rival Gentoo's extreme flexibility, especially given its unique claim to true package stability.

Speaking of which, someone should have double-clicked the Manual on their 20.03 Iso. Frickin html documentation opening in Kate by default....

firefox file:///nix/store/m6dlwcbahk4k6g952m3pmm48rhxh7af7-nixos-manual-html/share/doc/nixos/index.html

But that and signing into Firefox is as far as I've got.

Still a great distribution, but only learn to do things the Nix way™.

IMHO, that's basically true of any distribution these days. Back in the day when there were less and less complexities and features offered what we learned on one distribution could almost 1:1 be transferred to any other distribution.

Nowadays, that's not really the case when there are things like Gentoo & NixOS, Silverblue & EndlessOS, Ubuntu & Manjaro; SUSE & Red Hat and all of them off come with different setups and do things in completely different ways like SUSE with BTRFS, Ubuntu with ZFS, Red Hat with XFS, init systems used (let's not go there today, y'all), and more and we're not even to the different graphical environment which may or may not be the same since some come stock and some with various levels of distribution tweaking (true of Plasma, GNOME, Enlightenment, and any other DE).

[mdedetrich]

I am using NixOS, and its one of those distributions that have a pretty extreme design and because of this it comes with many pros and cons, I am myself currently debating about whether to change to Manjero/Arch.

The obvious major con of NixOS is syncing with upstream ranges from somewhat slow to really slow. NixPKGs themselves often update within a day but NixOS (i.e. packages that are required for the actual running NixOS) can take weeks or even months to be published. This issue gets even worse when you try and package things like drivers in the "nix" way because it often requires someone who has both expert domain knowledge in how Nix works and in how the driver works. A good example is something like bluez taking zonks to be come usable.

So I would disagree with people that say distributions have their pros and cons, some distributions are just flavors of others (i.e. PopOS vs Ubuntu) but others are just built on crazy ideas and NixOS is one of those. Of course NixOS is able to do things that no other Linux distro can do (or well), in NixOS you can easily spin up a shell with some packages as a sandbox, upgrades are almost completely atomic which makes it incredibly easy and safe to like instantly switch between Gnome and KDE (also makes it really easy to upgrade from old 3 year old NixOS installations to new ones, try doing that with something like Arch).

Personally I think the frustrating thing about NixOS is that recently the Linux and its ecosystem is progressing at a staggering pace (which is obviously a fantastic thing) however due to the nature of NixOS you always end up lagging behind, i.e. only quite recently we got officially support NVidia with Optimus/render offload (allowing the GPU to be off and only turn on when needed) but it took ages to get into NixOS and it still hasn't hit stable (you have to run nixos-unstable branch).

Since NixOS stable also lags behind quite badly, unless you are running a server I see no reason not to use NixOS unstable. If something breaks its already really easy to atomically downgrade.

[VanCoding]

I'm using NixOS on my Work-Laptop for almost a year now, coming from Arch. And honestly, despite the steep learning curve, it's really hard for me to take any other distro seriously anymore.

NixOS will be big at some point no doubt.