Hey fellow Linux enthusiasts! I’m curious to know if any of you use a less popular, obscure or exotic Linux distribution. What motivated you to choose that distribution over the more mainstream ones? I’d love to hear about your experiences and any unique features or benefits that drew you to your chosen distribution.
Nix confuses my monkey brain but every once and I while I try it again. One day it’ll click for me
The way I can dumb it down the most without being too wrong…
With most other distros (imperative) things are installed and configured in a way where you have to follow the recipe with all the steps to get to the end result - run installers, or do things manually or write/run scripts, tweak config files, etc.
The Nix/NixOS way is declarative, more akin to an ingredient list, a description of what your system should look like. Nix takes care of doing the legwork. The same config should always build the same system.
I’ve read that a lot and I always think I understand it until it’s time to put it into practice
Declarative vs. imperative does require a large paradigm shift for sure. I’ve used some of these provisioning tools before, but I’m still very much a noob with NixOS. They go further than what I said, they have their own abstractions on top.
My ELI5 way of understanding it is:
With Nix you write a checklist and it just does what you tell it to, settings, drivers, packages, apps, etc.
Other distros are like doing all the things yourself. You’ll never do it exactly the same twice.
You and me both