I’ve been hearing a lot about it lately and I’m intrigued, but also utterly confused.

Is this a Linux distro I’d install on bare metal because it offers a new way of package management that addresses the issues other distros have?
Is it something I install in the distro I currently use?
How does it work and what does it do?

I’ve tried to read https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works but the first sentence is

“Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell”

and that’s where it lost me. Thanks for helping me understand!

  • KISSmyOS@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    First of all, thanks. But I’m dumb and need the basics…
    Is it part of a distro with its own repo, its own package versions, maintainers?
    Or can I install it on any distro?
    Or only supported ones?
    If so, how do Nix-installed packages integrate with those of the base distro?
    Is it something I can run on my main system and game with, or still at the concept stage?

    Or am I completely off course here?

    • uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Yeah! Its a package manager, with its own repos. It needs its own becauseof all those guarentees above. Its designed to be installed on any linux distro, and also has windows, mac, and docker versions.

      If you want it to be all nix all the time, thereis also a distro NixOS thats uses nix from front to back.

      And, in a confusing failure of naming, the language you use to configure nix is also called nix, just to be cool.

    • dai@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Compatibility for games will be the same under Nix as they are Debian, Ubuntu or Arch. If your using steam just toggle compatibility and you’ll be set for most titles under that launcher. I’ve ditched windows in favour of Linux, jumped between Debian, Manjaro and settled with nix.

      Nix has been around for 20+ years now, it’s quite mature at this stage, but has lots of features under development.

      For me, nix is a reproducible environment, the same code for my install will build the same working system with the same configuration for applications even if a drive goes bad.

      My sensitive data is stored elsewhere, but my keybinds, themes and wallpapers, colour schemes for applications and even settings in those applications will be the same on a fresh install (so long as I’ve defined them 😅)

      Majority of my config is identical between different machines, lots of reused config with minimal machine specific config.