this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Also why does everyone seem to hate on Ubuntu?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

In my experience the Arch people are the sane ones and thr NixOS people are the young cult evangelists nowadays. I use Arch btw

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What is making NixOS so passionated about it? Is there something very special in NixOS that we are missing in Arch?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

If there was a simple Debian based distro that I could declaratively manage via a single config file, I think I'd try it. I.e. not using Puppet or Chef that can only bootstrap a system state, but something to truly manage a system's entire life cycle, including removing packages and anything littering the system file tree. But since there isn't, I'm using NixOS instead.

Having a DSL to declare my entire system install, that I can revision control like any other software project, has been convenient for self documenting my setup and changes/fixes over time. Modularizing that config has been great for managing multiple host machines synchronously, so both my laptop and desktop feel the same without extra admin work.

Nixpkgs also bolsters a lot of bleeding edge releases for the majority of FOSS packages I use, which I'm still getting used to. And because of how the packaging works, it's also trivial to config the packages to build from customer sources or with custom features. E.g. enabling load monitoring for Nvidia GPUs from btop that many distros don't ship by default.

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