cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/15781466
Am I out of touch?
No, it’s the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
Look, if you love declarative systems that’s cool. I’m genuinely happy for you that you have much better options now. That can only be good.
That being said, they only solve problems that I don’t have. I do not care even the tiniest amount about whether a system is declarative or not, and I’m definitely not going to go out of my way to seek them out. If you want to call that “out of touch” then so be it.
I just like them because my system feels “cleaner.” Always drove me nuts with Arch or Debian when you install something, let’s say it requires ~20 decencies, then you remove it later, run the respective dependency clean command, and it only removes lets say ~12 packages. Like where did those 8 dependencies go? Are they just stuck on my system forever? Atomic desktops don’t have this issue which I really appreciate.
The 8 dependencies must be an optional dependency for some other package you already have installed. That said, that kind of stuff is the main reason I want to try NixOS - any time I install something, configure something, etc. I’m risking forgetting about it and getting tripped up over it down the line, with no good way to check.
