I would hapilly use linux mint if only it didn’t use apt, honestly don’t like it as a package manager.
Ghere is also the fact that mint will have older versions of packages, for example neovim which I need to be latest version always.
That’s why I loved arch and gentoo before, for their package managers and roling distro nature.
Now I’m on nixos unstable and it’s currently my favourite unbreakable distro, and the nix package manager is really good and making my own pqckages is really easy.
What do you not like about apt? Genuinely curious, never used anything besides apt/apt-get and aptitude. Am I missing out?
If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there’s something you want your package manager to do but it can’t, you’ll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.
But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.
You don’t miss out on anything if it does what you need.
For me apt is just slow and clunky, don’t like the way some of the commands are and they are long, I prefer the way that pacman and portage do it where I can make commands be sinple and only be couple characters instead of whole words.
I liked pacman because it was fast, and it was really easy to block a package from upgrading and downgrading packages is really easy.
I liked portage because it worked with program’s sources so I was able to just remove part’s of program’s and their dependencies I didn’t need.
I like nix now because of the way it manages dependencies, and for the fact that packaing programs in it is really easy to do.
That first sentence is what I love about Linux bros. For all the supposed gatekeeping and pretentiousness that goes on in these circles, i find this to be much more representative of my experience. As i said elsewhere in the thread, im really not very well versed in all that Linux is/can be. And yet, somehow someway, ive never really felt put down for it when seeking help.
Before this comment, i honestly didnt know there could be such preferences to ur package managers.
Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.
Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use
nala upgrade
and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.
I don’t like apt too as much. But, interface-wise, you can make it way better with Nala, which is a frontend for it.
NixOS is too complicated and demanding for most users, who aren’t programmers or hobbyists, imo.
I prefer Fedora Atomic. It has the same pros (unbreakable, highly configurable with universal-blue.org, etc.) but feels way more user friendly.
I use it with Distrobox on top, so I can use my package manager/ distro of choice (turned out to be Arch btw) on a extremely reliable system.
For your case, you can replicate Mint by just installing the Cinnamon image from uBlue and applying some minimal tweaks.
Then you get the user friendliness from Mint with the flexibility and unbreakability from NixOS. Do you like the idea? Just in case you get annoyed by NixOS in the future 🙃
I like the idea of the fedora immutable distros, but the reliance on flatpak makes me a bit nervous (guess I’m just old-fashioned)… I think some kind of solution that puts a stable system like Debian or immutable fedora with a package manager like Nix might be very good (I know the U-Blue guys have been playing with homebrew?)
You can still install Nix (package manager) on Atomic, on uBlue, it even comes pre-installed afaik.
And also, there’s Distrobox, which is totally enough if you prefer package managers over Flatpaks.
I personally like the “reliance” on Flatpaks. I think it reduces the fragmentation and makes it easier for devs, but that’s just my opinion. Do as you prefer.
I don’t think OSTree systems can quite reach the flexibility of NixOS. For instance with NixOS (with direnv and nix-shells) you can essentially swap out your running system based on the different directories you enter and I think that’s still just scraping the top of the iceberg. From my experience with OSTree (which is admittedly somewhat limited) I don’t think you can reach that level of flexibility.
It’s still really cool, I don’t mean to shit on that, I’m just saying NixOS and OSTree have different pros and cons and use cases.
If for some unspecified reason you truly and absolutely need the latest version of something, nothing’s stopping you from pulling the repo and building it yourself.
That’s fine when you need only one or two things, but when you wan’t your whole system to be up to date as much as possible it becomes tedious.
I’m in the same boat as you, but haven’t tried making my own packages. Is there a guide somewhere I can follow?
I mostly just searched nixos how to package pyrhon/go/rust/ program or nixos how to package sddm theme/gtk/...
The best resource honestly are the randon blogposts since the wiki itself is really bad.
I also recommend the channel vimjoyer.
I also recommend to get into the habit of searching for options on https://search.nixos.org/options and for packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages which are great resources to know what you can set or install and already packages.
You can also check my nixos config on examples for how to package sddm theme and shell scripts.
I also have a couple programs on my selfhosted gitea that use flakes for packaging which you can checkout also.
