this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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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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how well is it suited as a daily driver for dev work & playing games?
The single killer feature that convinced me to move to NixOS is the ability to very easily keep separate development environments separate. For instance, if you're working on multiple dev projects that have different minimum requirements, and you want to ensure that (for instance) you don't accidentally use features from after boost 1.61 for project A, because that's the stated requirement, but you need features from boost 1.75 in project B.
In a normal distribution, in order to set up an environment that has the proper version for project A you'd need to set up a chroot, a virtual machine, a complicated set of environment variables in a bespoke script with custom installation paths that you need to set up manually and remember to source, or just install a newer version of boost and rely on continuous integration to catch it if you screw up.
In NixOS, you can set up different shells which all reference the exact correct version of the libraries required for every project, you can have them installed simultaneously and without conflicts, and there's even a shell hooking program that will automatically load and unload this configuration when you change directories into and out of the project folder. It makes managing many different projects much easier. It's like a better version of venv, but for everything.
Well, for playing games I use the flatpak version of steam and it works OK.
For dev work, it's great overall. Especially its ability to create separate reproducible environments with whatever dependencies you need for every project. However, there are some tools (rare, but they exist) that don't work well with it, and if your dev work happens to need them, it can becomes a problem.
For day to day (i.e. web browsing), it works the same as anything, with one disadvantage: there is a disadvantage here: it downloads a lot more than other distros on update, and uses more disk space. The biggest difference between NixOS, and say Arch, is not how it behaves once it's up and running, but in how you configure it. Specifically, you have to invest a lot of time to learn how, and set up your system initially. But then reinstalls, and (some of) the maintenance, become easier.
why is that?
The way nix deals with packages is very different from most distros. If you install a newer version of a package, the older version just gets hidden, not removed. This makes it very easy to rollback or recover from errors, but it does mean you tend to use more space.
You can always configure the garbage collection to reduce disk space usage, or manually run it.
In regular FHS distros, an upgrade to libxyz can be done without an update to its dependants a, b and c. The libxyz.so is updated in-place and newly run processes of a, b and c will use the new shared object code.
In Nix' model, changing a dependency in any way changes all of its dependants too. The package a that depends on libxyz 1.0.0 is treated as entirely different from the otherwise same package a that depends on libxyz 1.0.1 or libxyz 1.0.0 with a patch applied/new dependency/patch applied to the compiler/anything.
Nix encodes everything that could in any way influence a package's content into that package's "version". That's the hash in every Nix store path (i.e.
/nix/store/5jlfqjgr34crcljr8r93kwg2rk5psj9a-bash-interactive-5.2-p15/bin/bash). The version number in the end is just there to inform humans of a path's contents; as far as Nix is concerned, it's just an arbitrary name string.Therefore, any update to "core" dependencies requires a rebuild of all dependants. For very central core packages such as glibc, that means almost all packages in existence. Because those packages are "different" from the packages on your system without the update, you must download them all again and, because they have different hashes, they will be in separate paths in your Nix store.
This is what allows Nix to have parallel "installation" of any version of any package and roll back your entire config to a previous state because your entire system is treated as a "package" with the same semantics as described above.
Unless you have harsh data caps, extremely slow connections or are extremely tight on disk space, this isn't much of a concern though.
Additionally, you can always "garbage collect" old paths that are no longer referenced and Nix can deduplicate whole files that are 1:1 the same across the whole Nix store.
It’s the probably the best distro for dev work imo. Nix in general is really nice for development. Games work fine — you can just install steam or putrid or whatever, and you can run normal binaries with steam-run.