@[email protected] I think they found you
I’m in everybody’s walls… whispering the words “NixOS…”
Debian/ubuntu/arch is easy to use even as a beginner, just try NixOS and compare.
Tap for spoiler
No don’t use Nix they’re evil. Use Lix or Auxolotl or Tvix or Tangram or Brioche or Guix
Why is Nix evil? This is the first I heard
There was some politically charged drama… I think. There was some drama, anyway. I’m not clear on the details.
It was probably a Twitter-tier disagreement that was blown way out of proportion by a small group of people. If others have details, please don’t enlighten me, I value my ignorance.
NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.
(There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)
Overall linux is insecure and trash. Everyone should use temple os. Its the only os whose creator made an os to evade cia, thus making it secure.
Or arch instead of NixOS 😂
When my win 10 gaming box EOLs this fall, I’m probably going to jump it straight to arch, since it looks like the most straightforward way to build a Steam OS like system.
Imo a just works, deb based kde distro with nvidia drivers, flatpaks and no snaps is what we need to bring forth the year of the linux desktop.
Fedora KDE is not deb based, but dnf is better than apt anyway fight me
I dunno, we live in the age of ChatGPT. Between my generic but sufficient computer skills and ChatGPT’s hallucinatory ramblings, I’ve been smooth sailing on EndeavourOS for a few weeks now.
And one that you can get pre-installed on devices you can purchase. The “just buy and be happy” aspect is important for a lot of people as well, not to mention the valuable customer support. People with dispensable income who wish for this are usually furthest away from hackerspace culture though, so a lot of Linux enthusiasts seemingly overlook it. Or, when it comes to far-left people around, want to overlook it.
If I remember correctly TuxedoOS checks all those boxes. And I think if you want “same but Gnome” that would be SlimbookOS. 🤔
I’ve genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge
Are you new around here?
You could just look at my profile to see that I’m not. I’m also not new to Linux communities in general. Doesn’t change that I’ve never seen someone recommend NixOS to a complete beginner. I have (rarely) seen Arch recommended, but those recommendations will generally be downvoted and have many replies disagreeing. Linux Mint is by far the distro I see most often recommended, followed by Fedora.
What I see recommended nowadays is indeed mint, various Ubuntu variations, arch (always, although a lot of the time in jest), Nix fairly regularly, and as for the classics: SuSE and Fedora, they’re rarely mentioned.
As an experienced Fedora User, I recommend mint to newbies. Fedora having to add RPMFusion and figure out how to properly install the correct Nvidia driver can be daunting for a new user who is used to downloading exes. I love fedora though, and if it were not for that one thing I would be recommending it.
Throw Mint Cinnamon or the latest version on the computer, solved. Ubuntu can… be speshy sometimes on my older spare laptop, but it is not really their fault, more my computer is a bit cooked. Some puppy linux distros are cool, but also a tiny bit complicated for beginners.
That was the reason I decided to install Mint Cinnamon.
It’s been impossible to install for a week now. And I’m not even 100% IT illiterate. After ~3 days of struggling, I decided to do the walk of shame and post on the Mint forum, admitting my failure. It’s been unsolved for about a week now. >100 fails and errors, crashes, freezes.
I can’t even imagine where I would (not) be had I chosen Kali or Arch.
Tbh you might have failing RAM or something. Have you run Memtest?
Yes, I have done a few things already, including memtest. I’ll copy from the forum:
The things I have tried:
- Updating my BIOS.
- The ISO I downloaded has been md5 checked, all fine. I have also tried 2 other ISO files from 2 other mirrors - same.
- Three (3) USB drives to install Mint, ranging from 8 GB to 24GB.
- Installing with or without multimedia codecs.
- Turning on secure boot before install (I was desperate, found a forum post with a similar error message, later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Turning off secure boot before install (I found a different forum post where the exact opposite was recommended - later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Installing in compatibility mode.
- Offering a sacrifice to Xebeth’Qlu, tormentor of souls.
- Running gparted before install, deleting the previously half-installed partition, formatting it myself to ext4, then running the installer.
- Splitting the aforementioned partition into a 16GB swap partition (I have 16GB RAM) and leaving the rest of it as ext4 (mounted at “/”).
- Running chkdsk -f on the SSD containing the MBR+Win10, then rebooting the PC twice, according to one of the error messages in my post below (then trying to install again).
Might sound like a dumb Q but have you tried testing any of the live environments or are you jumping straight to the install, and if you have played in the env. for a bit, have you tried installing any other distro? (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc)
NixOS consist of a bunch of options that you define using the nix programming language. Since it’s a programming language, everything is well defined and organised into single place.
Technically, someone could build a GUI configuration editor with sane defaults and clearly organised pages of settings, which generates a configuration for you. This could immediately change NixOS from the most tedious to a relatively easy to use distro.
They already built a GUI editor, but a programmer made it so it is actually harder to use than the text file
Lmao which is it?
There’s a list of GUI editors here.
But I don’t know which one exactly they were talking about
And windows users are well known for their mastery of esoteric programming languages. Such as… um… ah… batch files, which, well, some of them can write. If they’re not more than four or five lines.
But that counts, right?Linux users can’t regedit. Regedit uses some weird programming language only known to a few windows grand masters.
It basically represents values with 16 possible symbols, ranging from 0 to f. We call it sixteendecimal. Very advanced. But nobody knows what they mean yet.
This should give you linux users a pause the next time you belittle windows users for their lack of computer knowledge!
Batch files¹, powershell, visual basic if you use Office, Lisp if you used AutoCAD back when macros were written in Lisp… 🤷♂️
¹- And, frankly, I doubt setting up NixOS is particularly more complex than setting up an autoexec.bat boot menu back when some programs (well, games are programs) wanted extended memory and some others wanted expanded memory (couldn’t have both modes at the same time, of course), and you had to make sure the drivers loaded in the most optimal order (which could vary depending on the aforementioned memory expanders, and which drivers the specific game actually needed) to fit as many as possible of them and DOS in high memory leaving as much as possible of the 640KB of system RAM free for the program… and I’m not even getting into the whole IRQ thing for soundcards and whatnot… and we had to do it all without Internet, learning by trial and error, or word of mouth, or from magazines…
Give them n00bs tinycore
I mean isn’t it accepted that NixOS is a terrible pick for a beginner, especially a non-technical one? I feel like even the Nix community doesn’t recommend the distro to complete beginners.
I use Nixos BTW.
And I can’t recommend it to anyone. Not even veterans.
I can only say if you like souls like games nixos might be your thing…
Doubt, highly doubt it.
I use nixos btw
Complete with home manager, flakes, build server and automated deployments, the whole lot on machines from compute stick, gaming rig, hell even a surface. I have never had more free time than compared to arch. updates & config drift are no longer anything I worry about. Save so much time on rebuilds & customisations.
Nixos users never recommend it for new users. I always recommend mint or Ubuntu depending on the person and what they are used to. Seasoned Linux users i don’t even recommend it unless they have basic programming skills.
After that, bring it on, stick through the learning curve, you dont need the documentation. I only needed it at the start for a short period until it clicked and I figured it out. the repo and search has more than enough. In the repo you will find community builds and configs for a wide variety of hardware.
I’m not advanced, just a distrohopper for fun :-) but NixOs seemed excellent, you install like an other os, open the config file and write a list of what you want installed, rebuild and it’s all there. Then use it just like any other distro. That seems a good experience to me and if you are just a simple desktop user like me what else would you ever need to do? Am I right that all the homemanager and flakes business is optional and for people with more complicated requirements?
Lol I’ve been considering trying it and that might push me per the edge. The self hate is strong xD
If you do, this website is very helpful: https://search.nixos.org/options
I wish. People recommend Arch to beginners all the time. And then wonder why there’s so many “Linux is too hard” comments everywhere
Arch isn’t necessarily hard. It just is unstable plus it encourages dated ways of doing things.
Those make it hard
And it just seems towering overall with the insane egos of some Arch users on forums. It’s a good distro, just setting it up feels so tiring.
I feel like setting it up is easy (archinstall), maintaining it is the tiring part.
Its weird because Gentoo is actually more involved but the community seems to have none of the ego issues.
I really wish everyone thought like that, but I still see people recommending Nix, Arch, Void… and some go the ideological route and start recommending systemd-less only like Artix or ranting against anything that uses Flatpak. Those discussions can get messy, and they always alienate the person who asked. Unfortunately those with ideological reasons are always the loudest and present in basically every “Beginner’s Help” group.
I wouldn’t recommend vanilla Arch only because of the installation process. CachyOS that simplifies it is an extremely good pick for a person who already knows what a computer is, but wants to try a proper OS.
Arch mostly got it’s reputation in the early days. Today some things are a lot easier to do on Arch than on other distros, especially because AUR exists. Also, it built one of the best wikis over all that time.
Weird way to spell EndeavorOS
EndeavorOS? Yay!
Weird way to spell EndeavorOS
With the missing ‘U’? I know, right? But it’s not weird; it’s just American, so it rewrites its history.
For most people though yeah, Debian is rock solid, only went arch on my desktop for nvidia drivers (and HDR), archinstall really simplifies installing it.
Arch and Debian wikis are both amazing sources of information, highly recommend for any distro.
Oh I actually need a recommendation… I have a tiny 7 inch LCD monitor. If I hook it up to my iPad the colors are fine but when I run it from the mini Linux computer I have the colors are all washed out and have weird dithering.
I know it’s a driver issue and I haven’t been able to find one that works. I also tried different distros. I tried mint, ubuntu and I think one other one that I can’t remember. All had the same issue.
Do any of you have ideas? How can I fix it
I would try Fedora KDE and then adjust the color profile on it.
I know that on KDE Theres Something called color profiles for adjusting the color range but I’m not exactly sure how to use it.
Nix OS is so much pain
Use Ansible or something else
I use NixOS on all my machines, much less pain and suffering than I’ve had on other distros.
I am daily driving nixos. It is for those users who have already used atleast couple of beginner distros. Get familiar with packages terminal and other. It is just arch but stable even at the unstable branch. It has saved from breakdowns during important work. But nixos needs time to mature it’s flakes and home manager.
Documentation? For Nix? Yeah right.
The code of the packages is the documentation. So the newcomers better start learning Nix language and reading the paper about how Nix works under the hood before they get started! /s
But seriously, I used NixOs for about 2 years almost 10 years ago and while it was/is fascinating when you have everything setup, getting there and maintaining everything across so many packages that each have their own way of configuring them took hundreds of hours. I’m back on Arch using a custom tool I wrote to fully manage my configs, packages, dotfiles etc.
The way I remember it is that there is no consistency across Nix packages and it all feels like a giant puzzle for people who enjoy spending time configuring more than actually using the computer. And I say that as someone who actually enjoyed getting into that when I had unlimited time.
I dunno man. I spent way less time configuring my machines on NixOS because it just works. But in fairness, that is after I have spent a lot of time learning it (compared to classic systems that is, not a lot compared to NixOS maintainers who write way better module than I do). Now that there is a foundation, I just run the updates. It’s almost scarily stable. And the ability to group related settings together is such a bliss because you no longer wonder about “what did I do to enable X”, just open the file, it’s all in one place. Stuff that could be three completely different things (e.g. a service specific config file, a PAM entry and the service activation itself in effectively 5 lines. Want to do something for multiple services? Just map over their list. Etc
I happily used Arch for 15 years and after trying NixOS on a decommissioned machine for one day I switched over everything as fast as possible. And I did try out Ansible on Arch, so it’s not like I didn’t try management via a tool. But using a system like NixOS just solves sooo many potential issues.
It obviously comes with downsides, for example there is no quick configuration change. Changing something small requires another evaluation. Still worth it
Okay, but when I figure it out on my desktop I just copy paste the exact snippet to my laptop and it just works.
Do you think I can remember the steps I took to fix my issue with Ubuntu? I don’t remember what file I modified and where I put some config file.
But to be fair, Nix is not the only answer to that. There are lots of tools for just dotfiles but you can also build something using e.g. ansible to manage everything.
All my computers have their config in a git repo. That includes users, packages, services, dotfiles, /etc configs and so on. I used ansible before writing my own tool. I can install Arch from scratch and only need to partition, run one script and then apply my config on first boot using my tool to have my system restored. I know it’s not as declarative and absolute/reproducible as Nix, but it works and it’s way less painful than my last attempt at giving NixOS a go.
Either my Ansible knowledge is too limited which is entirely possible, or you can’t do stuff there that’s possible with Nix. Let’s stay go with my example that you have something that requires changes in PAM. So you write an Ansible file installing the package (which is distribution-specific, so you’re losing one advantage you had over NixOS), enable the service and add your entries to the respective PAM file (e.g. login because you want to enable user authentication against kanidm on your machine). The ordering in these files matter. Sure you have
insertbeforeandinsertafterforlineinfileandblockinfile, but this basically requires you to know the rest of the file in advance… not a problem if your system is always the same, but you don’t have the flexibility and composability that Nix offers.I’d say, from my experience with Ansible, that it can absolutely do all of that. Might be able to use a single task for the package install, if the distro supports the generic
packagemodule. There’s also a pamd module that would likely cover your needs there. If not, it would still be possible with a custom module or some Xinfile fuckery (if it can be fine programmatically, it can be done in Ansible, more niche things may require writing code, however).It would not be as terse though. Really wish there was a good middle ground.
Did you know that the suffix for nix documentation files is, coincidentally, .nix?
