Their answer to Nix is snaps, which will never be the right answer to anything. They're stuck in an old mode of thinking and missed the boat.

NixOS or something very much like it is the future. I personally won't go back to the snarled mess of state that is traditional distros like Ubuntu.

NixOS builds on efforts of things like https://cloud-init.io/ no? Or was one before the other?

Its not a snarled mess if you understand what you are doing, imo. Though, when I first started using operating systems other than Windows (~1998), I was very confused, and made many of the same mistakes new Linux users make. Actually, way worse, as there were no resolution to my mistakes (using linux, was a big one back in the day if you were on newer hardware).

I understand where the sentiment comes from. I just don't appreciate the conclusion or the leech-like entitlement of the community. We used to fix and push.

Nix has been around since 2003, NixOS just takes that to its logical conclusion. cloud-init may have been inspired by it (I don't know), but certainly not the other way around.

By snarled mess of state, I don't just mean the way it works on first install, I mean the bundle of mud that imperatively managing a system inevitably turns into, with bits of this and that config left behind.

Try playing around with a few different window managers to feel the pain. NixOS makes it easy to try out new config and revert to the old config without muss or fuss.

Debian definitely has packaging docs https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/index.en.html and it's not that hard to customize an existing package (at least I found it easier than using rpmbuild...).

> Nix explosion

I am reasonably sure that you can, not that you need to, use nix with Ubuntu?

I use Ubuntu (and other distros) because I respect the effort behind it.

Why does one need to stop for the other to exist?

Nix on Ubuntu would be using a parallel set of libraries/dependencies. They won't be linked on top of the stable versions of packages as they've been selected in the LTS

I actually don't really know how that interplays with the rest of the system. If I build say... Konsole in Nix.. It seems like there would be no way for it to cleanly integrate with the rest of my KDE Desktop

The normal Nix versions numbers aren't stable. They have a stable branch but I don't think it lasts too long. And the "pinned" versions aren't as widely supported as Ubuntu LTS versions

yeah, https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/

> parallel set of libraries/dependencies

snaps do the same thing? kind of the whole idea?

> If I build say... Konsole in Nix.. It seems like there would be no way for it to cleanly integrate with the rest of my KDE Desktop

See previous link

Maybe I missed it... But That doesn't explain how it integrates with the host system (other than it doesn't ?)

It also doesn't explain how your PATH is maintained. When you type 'pwd' into the terminal, which version from the nix store is used? There must be a master copy or master symlink. You're not typing hashes all the time

Snaps have their issues, but if you run 'firefox' there is only one snap. The versions are not guaranteed to play nice with the distro app versions though. That's kind of why they can't snap everything

PS: There are actually nuances that it seems Nix doesn't handle clearly. If libA requires libB and libC. LibB and libC both require a libD at different version numbers - then you can't safely link two libD versions(short of name mangling). You need to build libB and libC at some version of libD that will work for both. Maybe you specific a set of workable dependency versions and let the system resolve them ? Seems very messy. Ubuntu just gives you the version numbers and you need to patch the code to work with them