this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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And it felt great.

Long story short, I was looking for a new Linux distro to use (very Fediverse cliche situation, I know), and of course my first reflex was to use Reddit. However, due to the combined enshittification of both Google and Reddit, I couldn't find relevant recent threads for my question, so I thought, let's use some search-lemmy.

A few threads later, I was able to make my decision. I just wanted to share this with you as this is for me a very strong sign that we are moving away from Reddit for good.

Some of the threads in question:

And in case you wonder, it's probably going to be OpenSUSE. Currently testing it in VirtualBox at the moment before making the jump.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Thanks! Let's see how it goes. The rolling release aspect and very polished KDE made me choose it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am glad for you, but I still have not gotten any help :(

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry to hear that. Have you tried on [email protected]? I heard it's also quite alive

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have not, I'll, although I am starting to believe it is a hardware issue :/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ah, that sounds bad :-/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I haven't actually used the search function much. Maybe I should try it. Can't be worse than reddits can it...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Currently moving to a new distro as well! I have chosen NixOS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using Manjaro for the last 2 years, it I'll admit to finding NixOS interesting.

A couple of areas I have yet researched, though:

  1. Is there a UI for the package manager?

I realize that Nix is really powerful, and have even installed it and tinkered a bit with it. But it would be nice to be able to have a UI to quickly search and install packages of interest, and leave the CLI for the more nuanced package activities.

I've got quite a few years of experience using yum and apt. The former, about 20 years now. I use pacman mainly to do updates, and yay to install packages pacman doesn't know about. It even in Manjaro, sometimes it's just more convenient to use the UI package manager.

Learning my way around Nix... well, were back to the problem of infrequency. Use it once a week, and only to do the one thing, then everything else is back to googling. If there was a UI package manager to use most times, leaving the CLI for the more nuanced activities, then....

  1. Is there a tool for adapting/installing RPM or DEB packages?

I've had occasion to install something on Manjaro which was only available as a set of RPMs (try/buy graphics software). I managed to get there eventually, thanks to Google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a UI for the package manager?

There is some kind of UI, though from my (very limited) experience with it, it doesn't work that great (or maybe it does, but I only skimmed it). You can search the packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages.

For example, if you search for cowsay, you will get some information on how to install it:

  • nix-shell -p cowsay - install it to a temporary shell, you will have access to the cowsay binary only in this shell
  • nix-env -iA nixos.cowsay - install it to your environment, this is in principle similar to apt or yum but IMO you should not really use it, as it beats the purpose of NixOS
  • add it to environment.systemPackages in configuration - this is the way for permanent packages, you add it to your OS configuration and then trigger nixos-rebuild switch - this command takes your configuration and makes your system match it, meaning if you added the package to it, it would install it

So for the UI, you can use the web https://search.nixos.org/packages and for quick try-out you can run it in a temporary nix-shell.

Is there a tool for adapting/installing RPM or DEB packages

No idea, I'm pretty new. But I know there are some packages adapted like that, you can copy and edit the source code.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've dabbled with package searches and installs as you've described. Basically the intro to Nix.

For the importing of RPM or DEB packages, source would be great if it weren't a commercial product :) Just going from memory, it was Maya.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I meant the source code of the package, not the app itself. There's something called maya, is that it? If so, here's the package source: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.05/pkgs/data/fonts/gdouros/default.nix

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, could you please replace the URLs above with a html link with the post title as the text? It'll be much more concise and readable than just seeing lemmy.world/post/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hey, I mean, just have a few clicks, they are mostly around distros choices anyway. Hopefully in the future Lemmy will handle those links with a bit more detail

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The word 'issue' implies that something was wrong, but you were just bored.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You can replace it by question, I guess? I still consider this an issue, but to each their own

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Of course it's a Linux distro hehe