this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
688 points (92.6% liked)
Linux
56360 readers
553 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm starting to think that in terms of features and possiblities, nix might truly be the best third party package manager of all. But the downside is that especially when using it the way it's recommended, combined with home manager, it has the steepest learning curve. Also graphical apps can be problematic. There is a tool called nixgl that tries to solve this, but it's a wrapper, so when a nix application opens a child process that needs to use the native system drivers, that childprocess is also wrapped in nixgl and it breaks. I recently found a neat workaround on github to solve this in a better way, which is to create a driver package manually with home manager, and symlink it to /run/, which is also where the drivers are linked on NixOS. This is a gamechanger to me because with no driver problems anymore, you can install almost everything through nix on pretty much any distro, except maybe for some programs that need system level access to run. You can install graphical programs, cli programs, and even entire window managers with it. I'm using full NixOS at the moment, but i'm seriously debating moving back to void linux with nix on top. Currently messing with it in a vm to test my configs.