this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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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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Hello Linux community.

I'd like to take a moment to explain what I hope will be a simple concept (so really it's more of a reminder) that everyone should say least know and understand.

Not everyone (myself included) learns best by RTFM. Some of us need a guiding hand or to watch a video instead. It's not that we're lazy or don't like reading, it's just that it doesn't work efficiently enough.

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[–] Paulemeister@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sure if it's in the Wiki the documentation is not too bad. But just looking for the documention of the lib functions via DuckDuckGo is somehow really hard. And if it's not in the Wiki or you want the home-manager module, I'll basically default to first looking at the options on 3rd party websites and then reading the source code for them. (Also the NixOS wiki is obviously not as comprehensive / big as the Arch Wiki)

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Are you not aware of https://search.nixos.org/options or https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.xhtml ? You can search all available options, sometimes with links to the docs for the thing they set for extra context. Those are both official docs and are derived from the code that you're already looking at.

[–] Paulemeister@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

The first one is fine but it always seems like it shows a huge amount of packages, just not the one I'm looking for, also I don't find nixos options on there. For that like using mynixos. I really like being able to click on a parent options and see all of it's children (They also show some home-manager stuff). And the options page for home-manager is a horrible user experience. For that I usually use extranix.com. Thanks though.