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.

  • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    Not being able to install non-flatpak and non-AppImage programs on an immutable OS like SteamOS without changes getting rolled back.

    • Dremor@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago
      1. That’s kinda the point of an immutable distro
      2. You can on some (layered packages on Silverblue)
      • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
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        9 hours ago

        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.