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Old 15th July 2022
Omphalotus_japonicus Omphalotus_japonicus is offline
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I've experimented with the operating system on a spare laptop of mine, and I very much like its idea of "stateless" package manager so to speak, borrowing the base concept from the ideal of a pure functional language like in theoretical computer science. I get the impression a NixOS system is objectively more stable than the standard system because of this package manager; old packages aren't deleted, rather superseded by a newer version. These older, still remaining packages, can be reverted back to if one wishes after an upgrade, acting effectively as implicit system snapshots!

Well, at least that's how I interpret it. I suppose I'll have a more refined opinion if I ever pursue studying deeper theoretical computer science--in any case, NixOS is pretty cool. The fact that the operating system handles programs in such an abstract way does make installing/running third party programs (any program not from its package manager) pretty difficult and messy, however. It took me quite a bit to be able to run a simple third party binary, though truthfully I've spent longer on lesser things; at least I had a good manual.
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