this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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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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[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Peasley@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 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.

[–] brian@programming.dev 1 points 3 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