this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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.
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as long as the existing packages are enough*, it's really good. if you need to start packaging stuff yourself this is when you'll usually start hitting the pain points (of both Nix the language and the documentation)
*: nixpkgs does have a huge number of packages but that count is massively over-inflated by essentially being a meta-repo that also contains all the language-specific dependencies of it's packages (think pip or npm) and mostly-auto-generated vim plugin packages and whatnot. for things you'd actually want to install "manually" the breadth of the AUR still trumps it in my experience
Is it, though?
https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique
Nonunique means other package managers have it, so it excludes those you said that inflate the user count
I recently played with the AUR on Debian using Distrobox, could that be used on NixOS too?
When I experimented around with NixOS, I never got a chance to play around with Distrobox specifically - however I did use Podman with no issue, which is what Distrobox uses behind the scenes so I suspect it should work.
There's also a Distrobox package in Nixpkgs which further affirms my belief in that.