• Peasley@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo’s mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.

    • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org
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      21 hours ago

      How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.

      • brian@programming.dev
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        9 hours ago

        but stability isn’t something that would drive a gentoo user away either.

        a lot of the draw of gentoo from what I saw was being able to configure everything down to how it gets compiled. it’s simple to apply a patch to a package before it gets built or maintain a custom kernel config in nixos, as well as all the advantages of declarative os

      • Peasley@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.

        Gentoo has cflags and cross-building

        Nix has Nix configs

        I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it’s no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.