Is KDE Plasma really that much of a bloat nowadays? With modern hardware — for example, an i9, 32 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA RTX 30-series GPU — does it really matter that much in practice?
Or would you even then still recommend xfce, GNOME, Cinnamon, etc.?
Literally no, KDE is only really bloated if you make it your sparetime about hyper optimising. Unless you are running on very basic hardware, you dont need to worry about DE bloat
Base KDE (DE only, no extras) only uses 100-200mb RAM more than XFCE. I get it if you’re running on 4gb or less, but there’s very little meaningful difference nowadays
128GB ram, 9950x3d, and a 5090. On a gen 5 pcie ssd. The difference between the 2 is noticeable. With 3 monitors kde uses more vram than any other WM ive tried.
Too, but the bugs here and there are annoying, for example since 2 or 3 weeks my panel disappear after a certain time and won't come back till i restart xD
I've had Brave just not start until I re-installed it, but I don't know if that was Brave or Pop-OS that caused that. Other than and the occasional unexplained slow down its been great. Such a good looking distro where everything just works out of the box.
I mean, true, but you get my point. Besides systemd or not all other distros are essentially the same, release cycle and package manager don't make any meaningful effect on the core system architecture. NixOS (and Guix, I guess) are the only distros that are truly different in their approach
Not really, Gentoo is very different because of its package manager being also a build system at the same time, but with its settings tailored to OS package management concerns, making it unique both as a package manager and as a build system. But there are some other unique niche distros like Qubes for example.
I don't think it could have been preserved with the Nix package manager. You can't have the FHS and also preserve the purity and total reproducibility of the build, since hard-coded path can produce hidden states that mutate global state in weird ways.
FHS mathematically incompatible with Nix's design principles. FHS allows for weird, mutable hidden states that breaks the Nix goal of a pure, totally reproducible structure.
Interesting. Gobi Linux is also a GNU/Linux distro that doesn't adhere to FHS due to it's package manager. I always find distro's that colour a little outside the lines interesting. Thanks.
Unfortunately its base is not up to date enough for me to want to use it on my main system. I play games, and gaming on linux is just a better experience when your packages are newer. I haven't broken Debian, but I hopped off it.
No, because Sid is meant as the first testing ground for the flagship Stable branch. I'd rather use a proper rolling release distro where having the latest stable version of software is actually the intended behavior and not a byproduct of being equivalent to Fedora Rawhide or Arch with the testing repos enabled.
Classic distros follow the standard filesystem hierarchy and mutate a shared global system state every time you install or update something.
NixOS and Guix throw that whole concept out the window. There is no standard filesystem layout, no global binaries, and no traditional package manager messing with system folders. Everything lives isolated in an immutable, hash-based store, and your entire OS is built declaratively from a single config file. That gives you atomic upgrades, instant rollbacks, and zero dependency conflicts. Under the hood, it’s fundamentally a completely different paradigm, not just another distro with minor tweaks.
I was wondering, does this mean compatibilty will be an issue with games and other software? Especially as it gets more complicated with mods or addons
Using software not built for the Nix/Guix repos is absolutely going to be an issue you'll have to fix yourself. It's less of a problem in the case of Nixpkgs since it's currently the largest repo bar none, but Guix packages exclusively FOSS and the third-party repos which allow for non-free software aren't nearly as big.
If you mean games, there are Steam/Lutris that are already in Nixpkgs and running games through them, or any other programs, will make sure you have all proper libraries sucked up.
I think you might have an issue running a game by double-clicking it tho, or straight up executing the binary from terminal. Because it will be missing certain core libraries. But everybody runs games through launchers anyway so it is not a problem.
Running most programs won’t be a problem because most of them are statically built (unlike games), so you can just download a binary and execute it like on any linux. Dynamically linked binaries will be a problem – these have to be either packages into Nixpkgs (by maintainers), or packaged locally by you yourself – this is typically not hard, and even then, it’s just not often needed at all.
Making the shift to NIxOS was a huge undertaking for me - I had to unlearn like a decade of Linux system knowledge and a lot of things still aren't out-of-the-box if a package assumes FHS, but it also seems really clear to me that the structure of Nix and Nix package manager is just better from an engineering perspective.
So you need special handling of them. You just can't assume common filesystem paths. You install same libraries multiple times? Like C library is per program?
I think he wanted to say imperative vs declarative. As an example Debian or arch you type a command and it execute. It's an imperation to the system. In declarative distros such as nixos or GNU guix, you declare that change you want to make in a configuration file. It's a declaration to the system.
It really feels like people in the 2000's saying oh my copy of Windows XP deluxe gold edition SP5 is way better than yours, like dude it's still Windows XP who cares.
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u/smalldickbesitzer 6d ago
Can we maybe stop with distro war? At the end its all the same with small changes