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Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) by Already__Taken on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:44AM (#15246930)
Nix and Guix node packages are 8.2 and 8.1 respectively. Nix can't seem to find a couchdb package and guix is 1.6.1

Arch package have node 8.5.0 and couch is 2.1.0

When I read blogs about new software and I can't just packagemanager install/update it on I don't really see any more value than living on windows installing exe's from websites.

Every distro I've used except arch has a real case of documentation not living up to what's actually happening. I've used fedora a lot and it's sometimes hard to find current version docs. But what's worse it hard to know if 2+ versions ago docs are ok because that particular bit hasn't changed.

Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) by DiThi on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:09AM (#15247561)
Nix has node 8.4 in its unstable channel, and it seems very easy to change[0].

I don't know about couch but it has 2.0 and the change to 2.1 shouldn't be big.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c699694cbf4400480fe4...

Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) by hedning on Thursday September 14, 2017 @12:44PM (#15249786)
Yes, with nixos it's easy and _safe_ to install packages from unstable while running a stable system as default (installing stuff never breaks your system).

There's also a fairly new feature called overlays which are used to fully track upstream releases (there's overlays available for rust and Firfox Nightly for instance).

Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) by plesiv on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:53AM (#15247987)
Your criticism is valid, but only temporarily. Lack of the packages in those 2 (in particularly Nix) is because the distro is pretty new in comparison and the community is not nearly as big as the ones of major distros.

On the other end, Nix's way is obviously a future in terms of package-management systems in comparison to the package-managers of the past - to a degree that I haven't seen anyone who read the docs ([1]) saying anything negative about the core ideas - I'd imagine that most people get blown away and become converts.

[1] https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html