That’s the whole point of stable distros, but people can’t distinguish “stable” from “reliable” so we get comments like “arch is really stable”.

Plasma has a cycle of releasing a bunch of new features and changes, and then squashing bugs every week when they discover them.

Debian is on a 2+ year release schedule, and the packages are frozen long before the release. So plasma might be either working fine, or be broken for 2+ years.

Fedora is semi-stable because it’s on a 4 month schedule, and AFAIK they don’t rush upgrading to new major plasma versions, so plasma works a lot better.

Generally from my experience, plasma works best on rolling distros, while it’s crap on stable ones. Stable DEs like xfce are incomparably better suited to stable distros.

It’s not just a reskin, the MX tools are really useful for beginners and non-technical people.

Most maintainers are volunteers, but not all volunteers are maintainers…

Besides the obvious non-package work, if you make a single pr for some random package and never again, you’re not a maintainer.

The Nix ecosystem is developed by many volunteers and a few paid developers, maintaining one of the largest open source software distributions in the world.

demanding work that we cannot expect to be done by volunteers indefinitely.

https://nix.dev/contributing/how-to-contribute.html

And every package is added and maintained by volunteers.

I initially tried guix -> switched to nix with home-manager because it’s got a lot better repos -> installed all user packages through nix on Debian -> nixos

Before nixos I used flatpaks for some packages because nixgl seems abandoned.

Why are you even running arch at that point, for the DE updates?

Yeah, who’d hate using a package manager that increasingly slows down your boot time with every package installed, or that uses a closed source store to provide you FOSS

Maybe there’s a reason canonical has to force it on their users

Be careful with Nobara. I’ve also used it for a bit (fedora 38 base) and had an easier time setting it up than fedora 39. It disables most security features to get better performance. Besides that, it’s only developed by one dude and primarily for personal use, so when it went from 38 to 39 he just completely dropped his gnome config, broke the upgrade in so many ways, and switched to kde. Also it didn’t have an upgrade notification and I had to accidentally learn that a new major version came out.

Dropped it after that because it doesn’t inspire confidence, no matter how important GE is for gaming on Linux. I’d rather spend at most an hour setting up MX (Debian) for gaming.

1. As you can see from the state of this thread, people see nix or nixpkgs but read nixos. There’s no momentum from the community to push it as an extra package manager, while every thread is spammed with nixos.

2. No gui integrations for casuals. For example Discover integrates flatpaks and snaps, but for nix you need to use the terminal.

3. The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would’ve had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.

Edit:

if anyone’s interested in trying it out, here’s a part of my other comment in this thread

It’s just a list of packages, and an optional flake to control the repositories (stable/unstable) and add packages from outside of the official ones.

To update everything nix related I just run:

cd ~/dotfiles/nix/ && nix flake update && home-manager switch