this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Still figuring out Nix for my daily driver (too many fun customizations moving away from gnome), but love it so far and built my last self-hosted box with it. So easy to redeploy after the initial learning curve. Boot from ISO, partition with disko, upload SSH key to decrypt sops, install.
Oh and since practically everything can be overridden, its easy to get bleeding edge using existing packages!
Nix is objectively a bad language. Glancing past the syntax (which is atrocious and the parser is completely unhelpful) it's just a bad idea to mix lazy evaluation and dynamic typing, the only way to get understandable error messages with nix is to put asserts all over the place, hoping one of them gets triggered by the evaluator.
That said I still love the system to bits and fixing the language actually wouldn't be that hard: Add static typing, with inference most stuff should just run as-is. Exception are the two or three uses of the y-combinator (yes, seriously, that's how you recurse in nix) deep in the bowels of nixpkgs, e.g. during stdenv bootstrap. Just make
fixa primitive, or maybe a plain fold I don't think nix even needs to be Turing-complete. Reason it's not being done is that there's enough other stuff to work on and, well, Stockholm syndrome. Good news: Nix doesn't support constructing import paths dynamically, that would have been a nightmare to sort out in a static setting.I don't mind most of the language having FP experience, but I agree the lack of static typing just sucks. I'm using the repl a lot to try and track down why things aren't aligning quite right when trying different techniques to keep things DRY and organized. Documentation is also a headache as a newb with the multiple ways of structuring a repo while trying to grok all the implicits and how it all gets merged.