this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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General Discussion

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Yesterday, for the first time, I solved a technical issue using Lemmy (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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And it felt great.

Long story short, I was looking for a new Linux distro to use (very Fediverse cliche situation, I know), and of course my first reflex was to use Reddit. However, due to the combined enshittification of both Google and Reddit, I couldn't find relevant recent threads for my question, so I thought, let's use some search-lemmy.

A few threads later, I was able to make my decision. I just wanted to share this with you as this is for me a very strong sign that we are moving away from Reddit for good.

Some of the threads in question:

And in case you wonder, it's probably going to be OpenSUSE. Currently testing it in VirtualBox at the moment before making the jump.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a UI for the package manager?

There is some kind of UI, though from my (very limited) experience with it, it doesn't work that great (or maybe it does, but I only skimmed it). You can search the packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages.

For example, if you search for cowsay, you will get some information on how to install it:

  • nix-shell -p cowsay - install it to a temporary shell, you will have access to the cowsay binary only in this shell
  • nix-env -iA nixos.cowsay - install it to your environment, this is in principle similar to apt or yum but IMO you should not really use it, as it beats the purpose of NixOS
  • add it to environment.systemPackages in configuration - this is the way for permanent packages, you add it to your OS configuration and then trigger nixos-rebuild switch - this command takes your configuration and makes your system match it, meaning if you added the package to it, it would install it

So for the UI, you can use the web https://search.nixos.org/packages and for quick try-out you can run it in a temporary nix-shell.

Is there a tool for adapting/installing RPM or DEB packages

No idea, I'm pretty new. But I know there are some packages adapted like that, you can copy and edit the source code.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've dabbled with package searches and installs as you've described. Basically the intro to Nix.

For the importing of RPM or DEB packages, source would be great if it weren't a commercial product :) Just going from memory, it was Maya.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I meant the source code of the package, not the app itself. There's something called maya, is that it? If so, here's the package source: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.05/pkgs/data/fonts/gdouros/default.nix