There's a relevant community post, NixOS is not dying, please don’t spread fear actively
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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Paying people to develop features or fixing bug is fine, but when a huge number of contributors are paid by companies, this lead to poor decisions and conflicts of interest.
I think this depends on the structure of the project though. The Linux kernel has a huge number of corporate contributors, but it seems to be doing ok.
Yes, indeed.But the Linux kernel is just the kernel, small compared to a Linux distribution user land with a massive amount of packages to choose from.
Unrelated but curious, why do people say that nixpkgs is the largest package repo? Debian unstable has over 200k packages.
They say that because https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total says so. Debian unstable has 38k packages according to that page.
Then that site is completely wrong. I'm not even sure where the 38k number comes from.
If you go to https://packages.debian.org/stable/, at the bottom of each branch page (selectable from the top list) is a link to a txt list of all packages for that branch.
If you run a quick wc -l through them you get 234k packages for sid (unstable), 130k for testing and 121k for bookworm (stable).
The wierd thing is that's also what repology links to, but I don't understand what they parse to arrive at that number.
I don't know exactly how Repology works, but I was interested as well.
This holds what sources are being used for repology in Debian: https://github.com/repology/repology-updater/blob/master/repos.d/deb/debian.yaml This repository seems to be used to merge/split package names: https://github.com/repology/repology-rules
The packages of Debian are split into different subpackages (dev, lib, doc and its base). This happens for Nix as well, but packages there just have different outputs. For instance, openssl has as outputs: bin debug dev doc man out. I don't think repology counts those outputs, so it shouldn't count subpackages as well. I guess these rules are merging these together: https://github.com/repology/repology-rules/blob/master/800.renames-and-merges/openssl.yaml.
The numbers are different because the site doesn't naively count every line but merges some as a single package. For example, at the very top of the Debian list we have 0ad, 0ad-data, 0ad-data-common. These are all counted as one single "package."
One might argue that doing the comparison in that way is more useful to an average user asking "which distribution has more software available."
Right, and the stable and unstable versions of the same package don’t get counted twice.
I guess it depends how aggressively they merge packages... Some software has different versions which are all useful. Some software has multiple packages which are different things, for example a theming engine can have packages for various widget libraries and various versions (GTK3, GTK4, QT5, QT6) as well as an icon theme.
On the other hand, repos like the AUR (probably nix too) have outright duplicated packages, made by independent contributors.
Always sad when Capitalism/monetization creeps in and cripples/pollutes open and free movements/projects :-( There are many many examples of projects dying off, converting to proprietary, etc. Luckily people are forking and creating new FOSS software all the time. I'm going more and more full FOSS, de-google/meta/m$ and so on. I'm tired always spending time changing software/workflow because of monetization creep, I'm tired of closed drivers, telemetry/spying, bitcoin scams and all the other utter garbage the Capitalist religion brings in to my life.
I have chosen Guix as my new home partly for this reason. Here, the default is that if I doesn't compromise, I know that I won't suddenly see these yucky things creeping into my system. That gives me a safe space where I can plan/build long term without wasting my time fighting Capitalism and all the shit that automatically follows..
I hope the Nix community finds a solution.
I have chosen Guix as my new home partly for this reason.
I'd love to use guix instead of nix, the language is far better and the repl is incomparably more useful.
But nix has 4x the packages, a third of guix packages are seriously out of date (last time I checked docker was behind even Debian), and those numbers are inflated by Emacs and lisp packages most people won't use. And that's before going into a serious lack of prebuilt bins causing you to leave large projects like firefox to compile over night, having to add additional repos to get nonfree packages, and essentially being forced to use Emacs for good UX.
Even installing guixos on a laptop requires a special ISO and instructions from system crafters due to nonfree packages.
Being Linux only is also hurting its applications for work, but that's not as relevant for personal use.
Guix is still really far away from being a real alternative.
Does Guix have a Nix Home Manager + nixpkgs equivalent? I currently use them to install packages on other distros, but with nixpkgs maintainers leaving in droves, I'm looking for alternatives.
Take a look at this Guix blog post. https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2022/keeping-ones-home-tidy/
I am interested in GNU Guix, and I've tried the OS (on x86 platforms) a few times but found it quite slow to install and perform the next steps.When I searched today for running GNU Guix on Raspberry Pi 4 I can't find clear instructions or whether it will work.Am I missing something ?I guess I can run the Guix package manager on top of for example Debian, and then learn some more Guix.
I guess I can run the Guix package manager on top of for example Debian, and then learn some more Guix.
I'd suggest doing that first and checking the state of the packages you need.
I gave up on guix completely for now when I tried to use it on top of Debian and found that the docker major version is 20, while nix has 24, 25, and 26. If I remember correctly even the native Debian package was ahead.
The best information I can find on getting Guix on the Raspberry Pi is the issues page for nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix/-/issues/128
t y !