https://snowflakeos.org/ - this project is focused on building an easier version of nixos including a GUI software store based on gnome software.

edit:ooops I meant to respond to @onlinepersona@programming.dev here

anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

Nixpkgs are the most up to date of any package respiratory source

It is likely that you were using the current ‘stable’ channel that does not have the very latest packages. The ‘unstable’ channel does have the very latest packages and is what I think most people use.

nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don’t really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I’ll def be playing with it again.

I totally agree, I wish it was easier to learn.

It worked for me with just: virtualisation.libvirtd.enable = true; in the configuration.nix.

Stable channels provide conservative updates for fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities, but do not receive major updates after initial release.

If you want up to date packages then use the unstable channel.

Nix has the most unique packages and the most up to date packages of any Linux software repository. It has substantially more fresh packages than Arch or Alpine (which you say does a better job in a separate comment).

Source:https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Yeah I agree, I am sure they are missing some obscure stuff. But in practise it has everything that I use and there has been no need for me to touch flatpak/appimage/snap

yep, I mean a GUI based software centre

NixOS:

• Largest and most up to date package repository (no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect)
• Reproducible
• Declarative
• Rollbacks you can select at boot time
• No dependency conflicts

I think it will easily be the number 1 distro if/when they can :

• the steep learning curve (e.g. have a gui installer EDIT: As in a GUI software centre)
• documentation
• have more tools use nixos and have nixos in mind (e.g. there are a couple of tools that didn’t work for me because of specific C libraries not beeing present/configured on nixos that are present on other distros. some libraries implicitly expect these to be present).

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How often do you run nixos-rebuild --switch?

If you don’t run it regularly then you will likely be waiting for a few different packages to get updates. To fix this you can configure auto upgrades:https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Automatic_system_upgrades

I have definitely found it challenging at times to do even simple things. I think it does get easier over time.

I really hope the new user experience will improve. Once the issues with flakes are fixed and they are no longer experimental I would expect flakes to replace the other ways of doing things. This will hopefully make the documentation more concise/focused/better. It might also mean more people start using nix/flakes which will surface more of these problems to be fixed.

I think people need to decide if the benefits they are getting are worth the challenges. I personally really like the reproducibility and the massive amount of packages available from one place. On other distros I have used things have ended up breaking eventually and I have had to re-install things and search for fixes. But on NixOs things keep working.

“I’m playing both sides, so that I always come out on top”

Most is described here (the author probably has some amount of bias but this is the only summary I know of): https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

Other than that some very active contributors resigned as maintainers in support of the open letters.

And it seems now that the community members in support of the open letters/changes have convinced the board of the foundation to agree on some things.