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Why I Left NixOS for Ubuntu (fd93.me)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Hey all, thought this might be of interest to some here.

Wrote about why I moved from NixOS to Ubuntu after using it for several months on my daily driver. Suspect that this take is likely to be kind of controversial and court claims of skill issues, which might even be true.

Let me know what you think.

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[–] 78 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

tldr:

  • fucking with configs for hours regularly
  • pip & venv doesn't work on nixos
  • DE broke when installed new DM
  • not much community support
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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I didn't realize pip and venv didn't work... that's a pretty big deal breaker for a lot of people, myself included.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not a Nix user, but doesn't Nix make both pip and venv obsolete in a way? Nix is a package manager (which could be used to package anything including Python packages/modules) and also allows you to create environments that include only certain packages of certain versions.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Sounds good in theory, until you want to install scikit-image or other Python libraries which need complex builds.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    pip and venv are working, but packages that require compiling or ship binaries by itself usually won't work out of the box. They depend on gcc or libopenssl to be globally available: the whole gist of Nix not doing 😅

    I've found devenv.sh to be most convenient way to handle such projects. You can define the dependencies for a project. It has explicit python/venv/requirements.txt/poetry support. It works for NixOS, but also other distros and MacOS. Very convenient to share and lock development tools and libraries across a team.

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  • [+] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I have been on arch professionally for ~5 years.

    I am a GUI fan and I don't like fucking around with the OS. In fact, I don't even want to think about it at all.

    So far it hardly required any maintenance (much less than Ubuntu, Windows or Mac, at least for my workflows).

    And the only fucking around I did with it was the first two days setting everything up just the way I like.

    To be fair, I already had extensive linux knowledge at the point of switching to arch - through ~4 years of constantly breaking my Debians and Ubuntus every couple of months.

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