this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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General Discussion

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Yesterday, for the first time, I solved a technical issue using Lemmy (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Blaze@sopuli.xyz to c/general@lemmy.world
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And it felt great.

Long story short, I was looking for a new Linux distro to use (very Fediverse cliche situation, I know), and of course my first reflex was to use Reddit. However, due to the combined enshittification of both Google and Reddit, I couldn't find relevant recent threads for my question, so I thought, let's use some search-lemmy.

A few threads later, I was able to make my decision. I just wanted to share this with you as this is for me a very strong sign that we are moving away from Reddit for good.

Some of the threads in question:

And in case you wonder, it's probably going to be OpenSUSE. Currently testing it in VirtualBox at the moment before making the jump.

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[–] quaddo@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using Manjaro for the last 2 years, it I'll admit to finding NixOS interesting.

A couple of areas I have yet researched, though:

  1. Is there a UI for the package manager?

I realize that Nix is really powerful, and have even installed it and tinkered a bit with it. But it would be nice to be able to have a UI to quickly search and install packages of interest, and leave the CLI for the more nuanced package activities.

I've got quite a few years of experience using yum and apt. The former, about 20 years now. I use pacman mainly to do updates, and yay to install packages pacman doesn't know about. It even in Manjaro, sometimes it's just more convenient to use the UI package manager.

Learning my way around Nix... well, were back to the problem of infrequency. Use it once a week, and only to do the one thing, then everything else is back to googling. If there was a UI package manager to use most times, leaving the CLI for the more nuanced activities, then....

  1. Is there a tool for adapting/installing RPM or DEB packages?

I've had occasion to install something on Manjaro which was only available as a set of RPMs (try/buy graphics software). I managed to get there eventually, thanks to Google.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a UI for the package manager?

There is some kind of UI, though from my (very limited) experience with it, it doesn't work that great (or maybe it does, but I only skimmed it). You can search the packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages.

For example, if you search for cowsay, you will get some information on how to install it:

  • nix-shell -p cowsay - install it to a temporary shell, you will have access to the cowsay binary only in this shell
  • nix-env -iA nixos.cowsay - install it to your environment, this is in principle similar to apt or yum but IMO you should not really use it, as it beats the purpose of NixOS
  • add it to environment.systemPackages in configuration - this is the way for permanent packages, you add it to your OS configuration and then trigger nixos-rebuild switch - this command takes your configuration and makes your system match it, meaning if you added the package to it, it would install it

So for the UI, you can use the web https://search.nixos.org/packages and for quick try-out you can run it in a temporary nix-shell.

Is there a tool for adapting/installing RPM or DEB packages

No idea, I'm pretty new. But I know there are some packages adapted like that, you can copy and edit the source code.

[–] quaddo@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've dabbled with package searches and installs as you've described. Basically the intro to Nix.

For the importing of RPM or DEB packages, source would be great if it weren't a commercial product :) Just going from memory, it was Maya.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I meant the source code of the package, not the app itself. There's something called maya, is that it? If so, here's the package source: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.05/pkgs/data/fonts/gdouros/default.nix