Multi-round Desktop Linux distribution showdown.

@ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario

Thanks for the thoughtful responses. I can probably get used to another quirky programming language, since I have worked with many other languages.

Might even look into writing a Ruby gem, or a Perl module, to implement a replacement to the nix language. Both Perl and Ruby are very flexible and user-friendly languages, and choosing either of those could significantly drive nixOS adoption.

#Perl #Ruby #nixOS #Linux

@purrperl @ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario Would that actually be... reasonable? I'm curious about your thoughts on how to implement it.

@abmurrow @rperezrosario I deal with debian packaging tooling at work, and the more I do so, the less I want to deal with debian in my own free time.

Nix and nix(pkgs) documentation are absolutely great compared to the mess around dpkg/apt/debhelper/lintian/different debhelper modules.

@krutonium @ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario

I'm speaking with very little knowledge here. I barely know the nix language. However, Ruby & Perl both lend themselves well to implementing Domain Specific Languages.

@purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario I think you're underestimating the scope of "replace nix".

@purrperl @ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario I'm not sure how cleanly you could do it, considering a number of factors like the entirety of nixpkgs also being implemented as nix, and it being a functional language, which I'm relatively sure (I've never used them) Ruby & Pearl are not, which is going to cause a lot of issues on it's own.

That said, don't let me stop you, I do not know a lot about this problem domain.

But bare minimum I think you'd end up having to implement the nix language as well as your own DSL. Or have your code transpile to Nix maybe?

@krutonium @ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario

Perl & Ruby are both multi-paradigm languages, and the functional programming paradigm is well-supported by both, in addition to OOP.

@purrperl @ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario I'm not sure how cleanly you could do it, considering a number of factors like the entirety of nixpkgs also being implemented as nix, and it being a functional language, which I'm relatively sure (I've never used them) Ruby & Pearl are not, which is going to cause a lot of issues on it's own.

That said, don't let me stop you, I do not know a lot about this problem domain.

But bare minimum I think you'd end up having to implement the nix language as well as your own DSL. Or have your code transpile to Nix maybe?

@krutonium @purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario ruby can convincingly pretend to be a functional language.

Though I wouldn't want to start a new project in a language that features DHH on the front page.

Perl is something that would put me off from using Nix. I'm happy that some critical NixOS components are getting rewritten from perl into rust/python. I've been using Linux/unix-like systems for 25 years now, and perl did not seem to improve that much in all this time. It gained… function signatures. And for a while it had a "switch/case"-like syntax construct, but that has been deprecated again, apparently.

@ar @krutonium @abmurrow @rperezrosario

Perl lost function signatures along the way, since they were considered impractical. Perl did gain a "class" keyword, to declare classes for OOP. It didn't use to have that, and supported OOP through an ugly bit of boilerplate code that Perl programmers would have to re-type for every class they wrote.

Raku is a sister language to Perl, written by the Perl community, and is a lot more modern, I'm told. I haven't tried Raku yet.

https://raku.org/

@krutonium @purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario ruby can convincingly pretend to be a functional language.

Though I wouldn't want to start a new project in a language that features DHH on the front page.

Perl is something that would put me off from using Nix. I'm happy that some critical NixOS components are getting rewritten from perl into rust/python. I've been using Linux/unix-like systems for 25 years now, and perl did not seem to improve that much in all this time. It gained… function signatures. And for a while it had a "switch/case"-like syntax construct, but that has been deprecated again, apparently.

Multi-round Desktop Linux distribution showdown.

This is the final round.

The distros were chosen based on the results of a previous poll.

Please consider boosting to obtain a larger sample.

Final Round: fight!

#poll #linux #distro #debian #nixos

@rperezrosario So here's my latest gripe with debian. I've been using debian (or its derivatives) on servers at most of the companies I've worked at, but only because most of my team members wouldn't be familiar with something that's different from "regular" linux distros.

debian packaging tools are funny. I encountered a package (not foss/in debian repos) with a postinst script that under certain (trivial) conditions would keep running forever. here's what happened when I tried installing it:

• ctrl+c didn't work
• kill on the running apt/dpkg processes stopped it, but…
• it's impossible to remove the half-installed package; apt purge told me: Error: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
• spoiler alert: dpkg --configure -a attempts to finish installing packages. that includes trying to run the postinst again, which wouldn't finish.

I could work around that. But I've been using linux for 25 years now, and have been working in sysadmin/devops-like roles for almost 18 years now.

I can't imagine a regular user even knowing where to start fixing something like this.

#debian