More specifically, issues for one distro (or maybe family of distros if applicable) and not other distros.
I’ll start: NixOS. I love how I can have my whole operating system configuration defined deterministically with configuration files, but what I believe is a serious flaw, is when you choose the “unstable” channel, the channel for receiving the latest packages rather than ones up to 6 months old: stable. Unstable package often build dependencies on device, and I’ve often faced build failures, why are new package versions given if they fail to build?!
Why can’t Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so, but I can’t think of any other distros that have this problem: where installing a new package version that came out a few days or even a week ago, has a chance of failing after its made available in the distro’s official package manager.
There are a handful of workarounds for your NixOS configuration in this case, but it happens too often for me and I shouldn’t have to edit my config for to work around it.
Not a problem directly with the distro itself but; Void Linux. The community can be really hostile over small things, when you are following along the road they laid they are very friendly. However, as soon as you mention someone they dislike, criticize the distro and request for something that doesn’t align with them you get a lot of backlash. I remember asking them to create official Void Linux Discord server on Reddit because Reddit was the platform devs were using. I got attacked because apparently Matrix is FOSS and it was ridiculous for suggesting that bla bla bla. Another one was, I shared my Void Linux rice and it was nice at first then somebody noticed the based.cooking bookmark on my browser and then my post got deleted. I don’t even follow Luke Smith I just found the website on one of his videos while learning about Linux. Besides all that, there are very little packages and they intentionally won’t add some packages due to political reasons, why the fuck would I want your political stance to affect my experience. If I wanted oppression in my OS I would rather use Windows or Mac, at least I would have more programs there. Sorry for the wall of text, just puking fair dislike ^^
The first time I tried installing Linux it turned all my hard drives into one partition
KDE neon on both laptop and desktop can be buggy. Discover does not open reliably, dolphin crashes randomly (in certain directories) and the display manager crashes and restarts sometimes. Idk why, super annoying and could not find a solution yet.
Ubuntu distros really need a ridiculously simple way both via cli and gui to disable snaps.And it needs to be respected through updates and upgrades.
Snarky answer: there is one, it’s called not using Ubuntu
Reject canonical, return to debian
Not being able to install non-flatpak and non-AppImage programs on an immutable OS like SteamOS without changes getting rolled back.
- That’s kinda the point of an immutable distro
- You can on some (layered packages on Silverblue)
When the Steam Deck and Steam Machine are marketed as computers, immutability is a severe limitation as to what can be accomplished without changing the installed distribution.
Which of the at least 4 places you posted this do you want replied to? n_n
… Actually, I got nuthin. No distro-specific problems at all are standing out to me as worth mentioning.
Are you sure you aren’t either applying nixpkgs overlays, or following master instead of nixos-unstable? I’ve not really experienced anything like you’ve described.
Anyways - I’ve additionally built my own cache server, which builds every output of my flake every time I push to main. System updates are ONLY downloads now. Also allowed all of my low-powered VMs to auto-update, since they’ll never need to build anything at all.
I have been using bazzite for a while, and I’m quite happy with it, especially in the respect that it just does not break, ever.
But not can it be frustrating sometimes to install things that have no flatpak or appimage.
That being said, there are a lot of ways to get around this, homebrew and distrobox, etc. And its also not something the deva are sound wrong, it’s just part of the deal with immutable distros. Will frustrating at times though.
Yes it is frustrating but once you know that you can just enter a box and export the app, it’s not too annoying anymore.
I don’t feel a difference on opensuse aeon with vscode in a box.
OpenSUSE : everything needs root password.
You can configure Polkit to reduce/eliminate password prompts for specific actions…
I’ve tried it for years, because I’d really like to have OpenSUSE.
I followed the wikis, how-tos and all kind of tutorials, none of them managed to make it usable without root password.
Heck, I even had my own custom image for a time, with those custom configuration backed in, but best I was able to do is remove about 50% of root password prompt. Better than nothing, but not enough to do the switch.
CachyOS hates my laptop’s realtek WiFi card.
slackware: ships libraries too old (python3.9, openssl1.1.1, … - this is on the latest stable, released early 2022)
i hope they get a new release soon, as the kernel is going EoL soon as well (5.15)
Why can’t Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so
It’s the kind of work that can be automated. Most of the Gentoo tinderbox build-everything-in-the-tree-and-file-bugs-on-failure projects (there have been several over the years) have been run by a single dev. I’d assume that Nix could do the same.
Issues with Gentoo? The only one I’ve encountered that I didn’t sign up for is the occasional difficulty finding documentation for some obscure and unpopular option, like downgrading the freetype interpreter to make it render pixel-aligned fonts the way I want it to, or bridging networks in qemu to allow a VM to address other machines on the LAN without systemd or NetworkManager (still trying to figure that one out). With Gentoo, unlike some other distros, you really need documentation—it isn’t going to enumerate the possibilities in a dropdown.
no glibc 2.43 in nixpkgs
