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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Nix has been perfect in this respect, giving full control over how you want things installed. The line between distro maintainers and users is completely blurred - you can take as little or as much control over the installation and configuration of any particular package or service that you want.

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That's a very heavy and expensive tool to solve the problem of "how do I install a web browser".

Now that Windows and Mac got bad enough, and Linux got good enough, it's no longer always 100% quackenbarkers to say "switch to Linux" to ordinary minor grievances, so those people had to go somewhere.

I've never had any problems installing a browser on Windows. What's the problem? You run the installer and it installs itself in seconds, and the browser periodically updates itself on its own without having to figure out any dependency headaches.

I was equating "switch to nix" as the new "switch to linux".

That's like saying "emacs is a heavy and expensive tool for editing a text file".

It's like saying get a new car because the floor mats got dirty, and emacs is in fact a heavy and expensive life change just to edit a text file.

Sure: if you don't spend thousands of hours editing text files, learning emacs would make for an expensive investment. It's a tool for the right use-case.

I spend thousands of hours using computers, especially Linux. Most of my waking weekday hours. Many of us on HN do.

Ubuntu also gives you full control over how you want things installed also, right?

You're not forced into one method?

You aren't forced, but you are going against the grain of the OS if you start doing things that were not intended by the distribution maintainers. I used Ubuntu for a decade - I'm familiar with it. Every tweak ended up in a more and more unpredictable and unmaintainable system that I had to just dump and reinstall every once in a while.

Correct! Removing Snap Firefox and installing Flatpak Firefox was the first thing I did on my 22.04 install.

Wait.. Why a flatpack? Isn't that just as bad?

No, it really isn't. There are a lot of issues with both snap and flatpak, but the issue at hand is performance, specifically boot times. Snap is far, far behind every other solution out there

You can install Nix on Ubuntu just fine.

Might as well just use NixOS then.

Nice, until you have to install Nix on an NVidia Jetson system, and you want full GPU support.

Nix as in the Linux distro or package manager?

Nix and Guix are package managers, NixOS and Guix System are distros. It is possible someone is using ambiguous shorthand anyway, though.

I use the OS, but I guess my statement applies either way.

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