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Nix - An universal package manager (nixos.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by howarddo to c/linux

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I think the main pain point of distro hopping is learning a new package manager, I discovered Nix a while ago, it works on every single OS, has the biggest package repo out there. I replaced Homebrew on my mac with it. If this piques your interest, give it a go. Later, you can integrate with Home-manager to manage all of your program config to have a reproducible dev environment on any machine, as described in the tutorial here.

The catch is it's really advanced and got steep learning curve. You can adopt gradually tho. Just get started with nix-shell and nix-env

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[–] howarddo 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

the problem nix trying to solve is reproducible build, which means from a single config file you can migrate to any machine and have the same environment, auto install and dot files. While other package manager install in a imperative way, which means you have to call the install command on every package you need and you have to remember it. That's the basic difference. You can consider trying it if you see it's worth it. It's harder than any other package manager I know, but it solves a different problem.

[–] sisyphean 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you, this sounds extremely useful, I’ll definitely try Nix!