this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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It was a rainy weekend, and after brewing a mugfull of coffee I sat comfortably and opened my laptop that I powered off yesterday after running an sudo pacman -Syuu yesterday to keep my Arch up to date. I like keeping things nice and up-to-date you know. The first red flags came when my fingerprint recognition wasn’t working when I tried to log in – but that’s fine, I can fix that later, not a biggie. Then the bluetooth was not seeing any devices; after 20 minutes of twiggling, reinstalling, restarting services, it did ultimately find, but didn’t cast audio through that. That’s ok, we’ve been there before, right? Wait why does my dGPU not turn on? Ok, let’s try reinstalling the drivers and cleaning some of processes, restarting. Ok now my bluetooth doesn’t work again – odd. Wait dGPU also still doesn’t work, let me remove the drivers completely… oh wait you also want to remove HIP SDK? But I need that for work… I mean, sure, ok I’ll install it again.

Morning slowly drifted to late afternoon, while I realized I have not spent a minute of that time on what I originally intended to do – recreational coding (that’s what all the normal people do on weekends, right?). After ultimately fixing all my issues I sat silently staring at my laptop, realizing I’m now roughly where I left things yesterday evening, except I burnt through a good fraction of my weekend scrolling through the Arch wiki and oftentimes toxic forums, the recurring suggestion from which was “if you can’t handle it, maybe you shouldn’t have used Arch to begin with.”

Well… maybe I shouldn’t have. ...

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[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 1 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

So.... is it fair to say that it's like Ansible then?

Ok, Ansible has the config files on a separate control node, but for a multi-device setup, would that be comparable?

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I'd say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago

No, not really. The imperativity of ansible vs the declarativity of nix actually does make a big difference in practice.