That’s the whole point of stable distros, but people can’t distinguish “stable” from “reliable” so we get comments like “arch is really stable”.

Plasma has a cycle of releasing a bunch of new features and changes, and then squashing bugs every week when they discover them.

Debian is on a 2+ year release schedule, and the packages are frozen long before the release. So plasma might be either working fine, or be broken for 2+ years.

Fedora is semi-stable because it’s on a 4 month schedule, and AFAIK they don’t rush upgrading to new major plasma versions, so plasma works a lot better.

Generally from my experience, plasma works best on rolling distros, while it’s crap on stable ones. Stable DEs like xfce are incomparably better suited to stable distros.

It’s not just a reskin, the MX tools are really useful for beginners and non-technical people.

Currently installed using Ansible, because that’s more sensible than Bash for this imo.

What do you mean? It’s just a few lines to symlink everything for me.

Don’t forget safari, the entirety of iOS userbase is forced to use it

While I agree with your point, this is more like signing a rental agreement allowing your landlord to enter your apartment unannounced and without you being present, and then crying about it when they do exactly that. I wouldn’t use hotmail as a throwaway account, let alone to develop the main Foss competitor of office.

You do realise religion is just an excuse?

Chrome and Firefox, VScode, Zoom and whatever other random crap

So chrome, Firefox, chrome, chrome, and probably more chrome

Most maintainers are volunteers, but not all volunteers are maintainers…

Besides the obvious non-package work, if you make a single pr for some random package and never again, you’re not a maintainer.

The Nix ecosystem is developed by many volunteers and a few paid developers, maintaining one of the largest open source software distributions in the world.

demanding work that we cannot expect to be done by volunteers indefinitely.

https://nix.dev/contributing/how-to-contribute.html

And every package is added and maintained by volunteers.

It’s an obvious vector for malware, arch by default doesn’t come with it, and users have been warned the entire time to check pkgbuild. There’s nothing fishy, it’s just that arch has enough users to be worth it to hit it.

It was either failing before grub or wasn’t in the list, I can’t remember now but I know rollbacks were not a possibility. If I remember correctly I had to reboot once after the install, then update, and then reboot once again to have the updated system boot.

This issue can happen with any distro, though rare.

I’ve used Linux for about 15 years, and that was the only time a fresh install crapped out on me.

Fedora is great, but it’s also the only distro I’ve had fail to boot after a fresh install and update.

Mint for sure. The slower release cycle is definitely better for nontechnical people, but show them how to install flatpaks from the app store.

Wait, so does the dotfile thing mean the out of the box experience will be degraded?

It seems they’re not changing the default configs, but instead adding an additional config that’s actually usable straight from the box. example video

/facepalm moment for not thinking of that at the time

But it’s lacking organisation and modularity. For example let’s say you need programming packages on one device, gaming ones on another, and general ones on both. It’s pretty easy to set it up with hm, and you can disable specific modules when you don’t need them (for example you rarely need to use a certain language and supporting packages).

It’s pretty fast, especially if you don’t get into flakes right away. You basically just install nix with a one liner -> install home-manager through nix -> start adding packages to list.

Here’s a comment I made when I was starting out with basic instructions. Do note I’m now using this command for updates instead (updates hm, package definitions, and the packages themselves)

cd ~/dotfiles/nix/ && nix flake update && nix-channel --update && home-manager switch --flake ~/dotfiles/nix/

For me the config management aspect of home-manager is mostly useless. It takes a lot more work to set it up, looks far uglier, and you need to maintain it because parameters change over time. Saving dotfiles in a repo, and symlinking them on install is simply easier.

The only two scenarios where it’s actually useful is when you have slightly different configs for different devices, and when the program doesn’t support dotfiles. A pretty cool example I’ve seen for the second one is managing Firefox customisations (settings, plugins, additional CSS), but I’m only disabling horizontal tabs so it’s not worth it for me.

And just update it with every package install and uninstall, on every device, forever.

Sure, but then you need to maintain it. I don’t know about you, but I never had the discipline to update it with every package install and uninstall. It’s especially annoying when you have multiple devices.

Declarative package management doesn’t have that issue since you’re managing the packages by editing the list.

Besides that, the home-manager approach works on any distro (and os?), you get bleeding edge packages, you get a built in rollback system, and you can handle configs as well (but I mainly just symlink them anyways).

For me that’s the main benefit of using home-manager on nixos and other distros. You basically just make a list of packages, and install/update them through home-manager.