News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?. Parent comment

Re:Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop? by qznc on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:01AM (#16060600)
There is a fundamental difference between system and applications. All common Linux distro unify them into one package management mechanism. Your comment suggests that NixOS is flexible enough to make a split.

Android and iOS clearly separate system and applications and it mostly works fine.

Ubuntu tries to split off applications via snap [0], but so far adoption seems marginal.

[0] https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/snappy

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop? by yorwba on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:11AM (#16060664)
If I understand NixOS correctly, there is no explicit distinction between system and applications, and everything is handled by the same package management mechanism. The value proposition is in having clean separation between all packages, such that each application can be presented with its own mix of system packages without any conflicts between them.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop? by meneame2 on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @10:36AM (#16061806)
> each application can be presented with its own mix of system packages without any conflicts between them

Furthermore, everything is done, or in the way to be done, in a functional way: system configuration, deployment, etc.

There are even efforts to manage dotfiles currently getting implemented.

IMHO, the Nix way is a great leap ahead.

[ Parent | on HN ]