DEV Community: tripleo

Why I did not stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux

tripleo — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:08:18 +0000

NixOS breaks. All. the. time.

It does that when you're starting out.

Error messages are cryptic

Programming is like that. Learn how to use the repl.
With less snark this is an interesting concept (word??).
But nix is a programming language, not an ini file (like aconfmgr).

Huge update sizes

No argument there.

Compilation takes forever (and binary caches are unreliable)

Wait a week. (I think they are referring to flakes/dependency pinning, honestly another interesting problem.)

Poor documentation

Read the source. (Sometimes this is a cop out. (sorry) Sometimes it is the only way. I was thinking personally about auto-generating source - DeepWiki is a great introduction to what is possible on this front, yet it would seem that a couple more rounds of iteration and feedback/competition is necessary before documentation writer are not actually necessary anymore.)

aconfmgr is "declarative"

aconfmgr is written in bash for arch.
dcli is written in rust for debian.
there is another one as well written for arch.

declarative and immutable and reproducable: i guess people need to get used to the new words.

system-manager

This would be a god-send (ill revise with a different word) if I had read (and understood) all the nix code it seems like I'm claiming I did.

As it stands, I'm still getting used to blueprint, which is a great first issue for somebody wanting to customize calamares. (aka note to self)

--- more draft notes

Some guy wrote an interesting post about his journey with nixos. I think that these pieces, scattered amongst the webs are interesting and valuable, and here I will attempt to do a more serious "reaction" to it, and then go to bed.

One note before I begin is that it is nice to see more well reasoned and well thought out things, especially on topics that some of the younger (international?) generation might not have the interest or exposure to.

Unison speed test

tripleo — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 04:11:23 +0000

I wonder which one is faster, and which one is correct, of the following two:

Their:

base.List.compress: [a] -> [a]
base.List.compress as = case as of
  [] -> []
  [x] -> [x]
  [x, y] ++ rest ->
    if (x == y) then base.List.compress (y +: rest)
    else x +: base.List.compress (y +: rest)

Mines:

base.List.compress: [a] -> [a]
base.List.compress as = case as of
  [] -> []
  [x] -> [x]
  [x, y] ++ rest ->
    if (x == y) then base.List.compress (y +: rest)
    else (x +: y) +: base.List.compress rest

https://dev.to/petets/property-based-testing-in-unison-2knp

Things to do after installing Ubuntu

tripleo — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 02:33:58 +0000

Disable firefox snap:

echo '
Package: *
Pin: release
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: firefox
Pin: version 1:1snap1-0ubuntu2
Pin-Priority: -1
' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox

Remove the nano editor. Some people like it. I dont.

apt remove nano

2b. Remove new console and text-editor apps and "upgrade" to previous versions until there is some sort of feature or ui parity.

apt install gedit gnome-terminal gnome-console- gnome-text-editor-

Install vscodium (you could also use home-manager -- regular nix-env does not appear to work).

  curl -fSsL https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/vscodium.gpg >/dev/null
  echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium.gpg] https://download.vscodium.com/debs vscodium main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install codium #-insiders, if you like that