• merci3@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Hmm, I personally place Nix at the same level as Arch, because I see both distros being hard to get into because of how different they do stuff when compared to the average OS.

      Maybe the real level up is trying to run BSD on unsupported hardware?

      • Laser@feddit.org
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        5 hours ago

        Arch is easier in my opinion, at least if you want to leverage the power NixOS can offer. A simple /etc/nixos/configuration.nix maybe not, but once you enter custom options / submodule territory and use stuff like lib.mapAttrs, I’d say NixOS is quite harder. Or just a more complex overrideAttrs. But then again, Arch doesn’t have an equivalent to that…

        • Victor@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          I didn’t need to learn a programming language to install Arch btw. I’d definitely agree Nix is an unnecessary complication for very little gain for the average user.

          • Laser@feddit.org
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            9 minutes ago

            Well, you don’t need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the configuration.nix part was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn’t say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.

            There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can’t go wrong with it

          • TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            Let’s skip all intermediate quotes and directly jump to the xkcd reference: I only program with butterflies. Of course, there is an Emacs command for that: good ol’ C-x M-c M-butterfly