this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is "I just want to install a package"; its like exiting vim all over again.
edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to
pacman -Syor whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can't in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don't want to use an OS I wouldn't recommend to others.What's complex about pacman? I've found pacman to be more reliable and easier to manage than apt, so I'm just curious about your experience
My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with "pacman -S" (or is it "pacman -Sy"?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with "nix-env -iA". I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, "npm install foo" both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.