So we can clearly see the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them, please follow this format:

  • Write the name of the Linux distro as a first-level comment.
  • Reply to that comment with each reason you like the distro as a separate answer.

For example:

  • Distro (first-level comment)
    • Reason (one answer)
    • Other reason (a different answer)

Please avoid duplicating options. This will help us better understand the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them.

  • tetris11
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’m currently doing my second pass of Nix after diving deep into it last time and coming out unsatisfied. The same problems that I had before with it are problems I’m seeing again:

    • disjointed configs pulled from random source or build repos on the internet
    • unintuitive grammars with parameters that require you to download an autocompletion spec
    • flakes that aren’t immediately easy to grok

    Contrast that with my last Guix experience:

    • Lisp form, super easy to understand grammar
    • Recipes are so trivial that I’ve written three on my first day
    • Source tree is included and you are expected to add branches to it

    The only problem with Guix that I can see is that it’s not as popular

    • nychtelios@rlyeh.icu
      2·
      1 year ago

      Flakes are extremely simple (my whole system is a flake: https://github.com/cmargiotta/dotfiles ), but they are basically not documented.

      The grammar is really really bad, I prefere a lot the Guix one too! I am using NixOS only because the last time I tried Guix I didn’t find a lot of packages for their extremist GNU policy (I agree, but I need some packages), is it still like that?

      • tetris11
        1·
        1 year ago

        is it still like that?

        Yes and no – there are now non-free repos (so you can install firefox for example), and even non-free binary repos too.