Linux

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[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 7 points 11 months ago

I just left nixos after about two years, and now on cachyos (arch). nixos is pretty cool in a lot of ways, but trying to stay on the bleeding edge of packages and kernels means living in nixos-unstable land, where broken builds are common. and I just got tired of it all.

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[–] chellomere@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (1 child)

My condolences

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[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Fun fact: if you have a Steam Deck, Nix (the package manager) is pretty much the only vendor-approved way to safely install extra packages that aren't otherwise available as a flatpak.

Trying to screw with overlayfs to make pacman usable is/was a thing, and it was a very good way to break the OS install despite it having atomic updates.

hideshow 4 child comments

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[–] DaTingGoBrrr@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Fun fact: SteamOS comes pre-loaded with Distrobox so you can install whatever packages you want.

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[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

That's new. Always good to see them add more ways to customize it.

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[–] DaTingGoBrrr@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

I think it has been a feature since around 6 months after launch of the Steam Deck but it's not well known and widely used feature.

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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?

Needs "pac-ostree" or something...

Also, what about distrobox?

I haven't really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I'm going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).

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[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?

Steam Deck has a custom solution involving an A/B partition scheme of immutable btrfs filesystems and overlayfs for layering changes on top of that.

Also, what about distrobox?

If there's a way to install containerization software with Flatpak, maybe. Docker isn't available out of the box, though.

I haven't really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I'm going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).

You can use pacman, but it's volatile and requires making intentional changes to restore its functionality.

The first option is to disable the read-only flag on the root filesystem, then set pacman back up so it can pull packages. Whenever the root filesystem image is updated, you'll lose the changes, though.

The second option is to add an overlayfs to persist the changes in a different partition or inside a disk image on the writable storage. There was a tool called "rwfus" that did this, and it worked well enough if you were careful. If you ended up upgrading a package that came installed on the base image, though, it would end up breaking the install when the next update came around.

With all the caveats, when Valve made /nix available as a persistent overlay a couple of years ago, I just bit the bullet and learned how to use Nix to install packages with nix-env -i.

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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info

Distrobox works really well in Bazzite, in fact I'm currently typing this comment in LibreWolf in a Fedora toolbox because I was getting a weird lag with the flatpak version. You wouldn't even know if you didn't set it up yourself, since it's just an icon on my launcher like any other program. No noticeable overhead whatsoever either.

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[–] quarterlife@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

SteamOS also ships distrobox OOTB now, so you can use this anywhere.

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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 months ago

Awesome

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[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

NixOS isn't great for non-programmers, I bet, but for programmers it's amazing.

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[–] DegenerateSupreme@lemmy.zip 5 points 11 months ago

I’m just now starting my degree is software engineering. I’m 31. I’d gotten comfortable enough with Linux that I wanted to try NixOS to avoid having my system get borked again (in my case, KDE Plasma started having shell crashes at log in).

If I was only using NixOS to run a basic computer set up? Sure, no problem. If I want to rice and customize it? No, I wasn’t ready.

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[–] Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

But but Phoronix just told me yesterday that Linux users went dramatically down on Steam from 3% to 2.99%! Almost like this weekly/monthly claim of Linux users "crossing" another imaginary threshold line hold as much value as this comment /s

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

To be fair, we have to be that way to push back against the field of inveitability that omnipresent corporate marketing creates in our minds.

The extroverted nerdiness is an effective tool to communally deprogram our rheified way of looking at computers so we can envision a different future.