It’s pretty much the same thing as everywhere, you have a bunch of lovely people who package and test things, nothing too weird. What you are describing is LFS.
I was under the impression that you had to compile everything yourself on Gentoo and in Nix that you have to mess with a config to do everything and anything.
Maybe I should try them both to see what the fuzz is about.
Speaking about Gentoo, you don’t “have to” compile everything, but let’s just say it’s strongly encouraged. Most of the compilation is automated though, think AUR on steroids. If you don’t want to touch anything, you can go with defaults for all the software and you’ll get basically what you get on any other distro.
The thing is, though, if you are not being a little funny with your software, why the hell are you running Gentoo? So, it’s entirely optional, but it’s the main reason one would use Gentoo, otherwise you get a stock standard system with stupidly long updates.
I can’t speak for Nix, though, I haven’t touched it myself, but from what I know from those around me running it, it’s pretty much the same thing, unless you want something cool, you don’t have to suffer.
Okey thank you so much for the information! I can see the appeal. More freedom and customization. I am all for it.
But for my use cases I think Arch is enough. It strikes a nice balance with official packages and the AUR and I love that you get to choose all of the packages you want to have installed.
This is the way! Everything is based on Arch, Debian or Fedora anyway so you might as well stick to what is well known and supported.
Slackware users in shambles!
angry Gentoo and NixOS noises
From my understanding NixOS and Gentoo is “support it yourself”. I haven’t tried either of them so I could be completely wrong about that.
It’s pretty much the same thing as everywhere, you have a bunch of lovely people who package and test things, nothing too weird. What you are describing is LFS.
I was under the impression that you had to compile everything yourself on Gentoo and in Nix that you have to mess with a config to do everything and anything.
Maybe I should try them both to see what the fuzz is about.
Speaking about Gentoo, you don’t “have to” compile everything, but let’s just say it’s strongly encouraged. Most of the compilation is automated though, think AUR on steroids. If you don’t want to touch anything, you can go with defaults for all the software and you’ll get basically what you get on any other distro.
The thing is, though, if you are not being a little funny with your software, why the hell are you running Gentoo? So, it’s entirely optional, but it’s the main reason one would use Gentoo, otherwise you get a stock standard system with stupidly long updates.
I can’t speak for Nix, though, I haven’t touched it myself, but from what I know from those around me running it, it’s pretty much the same thing, unless you want something cool, you don’t have to suffer.
Okey thank you so much for the information! I can see the appeal. More freedom and customization. I am all for it.
But for my use cases I think Arch is enough. It strikes a nice balance with official packages and the AUR and I love that you get to choose all of the packages you want to have installed.