Linux

48317 readers

695 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How have you automated configuring your machines in terms of packages and dotfiles so it works cross-distro? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm looking for interesting tools to automate managing packaging and configuring everything automated.

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment so I for now know these:

Ansible - automating many machines, using different package names as vars and package managers.
Bash - the most native and compatible scripting language that can be.
Chezmoi - for dotfiles.

For now that's it. I'm looking forward for your suggestions!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It always seemed to me like Nix package manager is not "native" enough or there are some downsides compared to dnf or apt. If that's not the case I think I've got my answer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

From an outsider perspective (I haven't used Nix at all), the downsides I see are that it's extra software on top of the defaults for any given distro, it's not optimized for the distro (meaning it might pull in dependencies that already exist or not use distro specific APIs/libs), and it doesn't adhere to the motivations of the distro (e.g. not adhering to the DFSGs for Debian).

And of course, most of the packages are community maintained and there's the immutability, which might be a hinderance to some use cases, but not for me.

All in all, not really the worst if you're not worried about space or getting the absolute most in performance and not an ideologue, but it's enough to make me stick with APT. I chose Debian because of its commitment to FOSS, not the stability nor performance.