I actually don't want a package manager tuned for "my grandma" (the white whale of the linux community). I'm a professional dev, Arch perfectly suits my needs where as Flatpak/Snap... cause excruciating pain every time I'm forced to interact with them (something I go out of my way to avoid at this point).
> Immutable system does not prevent writable /usr/local/bin.
I can't speak to the others, but Nix most definitely does not make /usr/local/bin writable. You have to package up your tools to use them.
So you have particularly skewed perspective; you should try a bit of operations, or at least devops, to normalize it.
> Arch perfectly suits my needs
Good for you. You just need to realize that you are minority. Do you notice that Arch is not the dominant distro? There's a reason for that.
> where as Flatpak/Snap... cause excruciating pain every time I'm forced to interact with them
You are holding it wrong ;)
> but Nix
Nix is not exactly a typical immutable system; it has strong opinions about many things, that other systems don't. You can't evaluate other systems through assuming they are like nix.
Nowadays, even MacOS is immutable and people live with it just fine.
> So you have particularly skewed perspective; you should try a bit of operations, or at least devops, to normalize it.
I didn't say that you should use Arch on the server, but it's great for the desktop.
You can refer to this entire thread to see how well Flatpak/Snap... are working out. Pretty much universally reviled by developers (people who actually use Linux on the desktop).
> I didn't say that you should use Arch on the server, but it's great for the desktop.
And I said that apt/dnf solve problems that pacman didn't start thinking about yet. So we are in agreement here.
Flatpak seems to be working out pretty fine.
> Pretty much universally reviled by developers (people who actually use Linux on the desktop).
Two things:
1) Reviled by some very conservative types, often not willing to consider things from different perspective than what they are used to. If they would build the desktop, it would end up like Homer's dream car.
2) Don't you think that it is a problem when only developers use the desktop as it is? (Not really true, but let's consider that for the sake of argument).
> 1) Reviled by some very conservative types, often not willing to consider things from different perspective than what they are used to. If they would build the desktop, it would end up like Homer's dream car.
I would consider myself non-conservative to the extreme, which is exactly why I don't like Snap since it's built out of fear of problems that I simply don't have. I want the latest versions of any given piece of software and I want my package manager to be performant. I don't think those are conservative values.
> 2) Don't you think that it is a problem when only developers use the desktop as it is? (Not really true, but let's consider that for the sake of argument).
I don't think developers having a great computing environment is a problem at all, quite the opposite. I think it's very desirable and I think efforts that hamper that for the mythical "grandma" are indicative of the core UX problems that plague the "desktop linux" community.
> Immutable system does not prevent writable /usr/local/bin.
I can't speak to the others, but Nix most definitely does not make /usr/local/bin writable. You have to package up your tools to use them.