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.
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Fedora Selinux, I mean, yes security is important. But how often is it in the way. In docker my mounts always need a :z and other stuff. Switched back to Debian. Apparmor doesn’t need this finetuning and just works.
This is a fairly minor issue since it’s quite an easy fix, but it really annoys me that Debian doesn’t include the sbin folders in the default user path. Meaning that if you try to run a command that needs sudo, instead of telling you it needs sudo it just says the command doesn’t exist
I thought this was how unix always has been? Sbin is for root binaries. It doesn’t make sense to include a bunch of commands you don’t have permission to execute in the path. I remember this being the case back in the 90s and didn’t realize it was no longer the norm.
I think it’s obfuscation for security.
oh so that’s why!
Fedora Core (so it’s quite a while ago) had dependency hell on a completely fresh install. In fact it was the first update. I’m still salty about it!
Bazzite: You can’t rollback if you replace rpm-ostree binary with a buggy bash script
Mostly, I’ve only had minor issues: Old packages on Linux Mint, missing packages on Debian and Arch, system instability after updating without a reboot on many distros (NixOS, Fedora, Alma, …). But I’ve had two major issues that caused me to abandon a distro:
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On Fedora KDE, I felt that my system was overall not as stable as other distros. Then they decided to ship (as a rolling update to a “stable” version) an experimental KDE patch that broke the lock screen for a week. The breakage itself was not so bad, but shipping a patch before upstream merged it to their nightly builds irked me quite a bit.
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On NixOS, I was not able to get development stuff to work (I’m probably just too dumb for Nix/NixOS). First, I tried to set up a dev workflow that has quite a few external constraints (glibc version, Python version, running on other distros, …). I failed on multiple fronts and gave up on this. Then I tried to build my own KDE/Kirigami app on NixOS and also struggled a lot with it. I struggled for quite a while but gave up on it in the end. I moved to CachyOS afterwards and it worked flawlessly 🤷
At least you were intellectually honest about NixOS rather than blaming them.
I swear by it but had a year or two where I was struggling. Particularly with languages like Python, it can be tough to train yourself in the Nix way (or to wrap compilation and dependency management into the nix paradigm in this case). With languages like Haskell though, the Nix way goes hand-in-hand with it.
I’ve found Zig to work well with Nix. And there are ways to use Nix REALLY elegantly with Python
Here’s an example of how you’d provision a super simple nix flake dev environment in x86_64 Linux for undetected web scraping with Python
# save this as flake.nix then run nix develop in the root of the repo { description = "Web Scraper"; inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs?ref=nixpkgs-unstable"; utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils"; }; outputs = { self, nixpkgs, utils }: utils.lib.eachSystem ["x86_64-linux"] (system: let pkgs = import nixpkgs { system = system; }; in rec { packages = { pythonEnv = pkgs.python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ webdriver-manager openpyxl pandas requests beautifulsoup4 websocket-client selenium keyboard ]); }; devShell = pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = [ pkgs.chromium pkgs.undetected-chromedriver packages.pythonEnv ]; shellHook = '' export PATH=${pkgs.chromium}/bin:${pkgs.undetected-chromedriver}/bin:$PATH ''; }; }); }
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OpenSuse TW. Network seems to be permission based. If I’m connected to the Internet on one user and someone logs in, they cannot connect without my pass. Quite ridiculous.
Oh, and I used to hibernate. Then it stopped working. Now I try to sleep and that sporadically fails requiring restart.
Used Tumbleweed as my main OS for years and this was always a pain point. Why do you need root privileges to connect to a network on a fresh install?? I can’t be bothered to find a link, but Linus Torvalds himself complained about this and said it was the reason he didn’t want his kids to use SUSE/openSUSE on their computers, since he didn’t want them to have root privileges, lol.
OP:
i SwItChEd On BlEeDiNg EdGe BuIlDs ThEn CaN’t UnDeRsTaNd WhY i NeEd To BuIlD tHe LaTeSt SoFtWaRe FrOm SoUrCe. It MuSt Be NiXoS’s FaUlT tHaT i DiDn’T bOtHeR tO lEaRn HoW nIxOs WoRkS bEfOrE sWiTcHiNg On FeAtUrEs ThAt ArE lItErAlLy LaBeLeD “uNsTaBlE”. pS. oH yEaH. bEfOrE sOmEoNe MeNtIoNs It, I kNoW tHe SoLuTiOn BuT wOn’T bOtHeR tO pOsT iT bEcAuSe I jUsT wAnTeD tO pUbLiClY sHiT oN aNd HaMpEr NiXoS’s ChAnCeS oF wIdEsPrEaD aDoPtIoN bEcAuSe It Is HaRd FoR mE. wHaT oThEr LiNuX dIsTrOs Do YoU tHiNk ArE rUn By UtTeR bOnEhEaDs ThAt BuIlD sTuFf ThAt MuSt Be FlAwEd Or WrOnG bEcAuSe YoU cAn’T gEt It To WoRk On ThE fIrSt TrY?
# /etc/nixos/configuration.nix nix.settings = { substituters = [ "https://nix-community.cachix.org/" ]; trusted-public-keys = [ "nix-community.cachix.org-1:mB9FSh9qf2dCimDSUo8Zy7bkq5CX+/rkCWyvRCYg3Fs=" ]; };
