>It's also the most convenient system I ever worked with for creating custom packages
Is Arch Build System one of the systems you've ever worked with? (I found ABS very convenient.)
Is Arch Build System one of the systems you've ever worked with? (I found ABS very convenient.)
- No separate AUR that some packages are arbitrarily located in
- Not having to care about binary packages: they are just transparently downloaded and used if available
Pacaur makes the AUR a bit more palatable, but you still notice the split.
My experience is mostly with deb and rpm before Nix.
So maybe the Arch maintainers got more disciplined, or maybe I just got better at not breaking things. Probably both.
(I already get that the design of NixOS prevents the system's ending up in an incoherent state, which will happen on Arch eventually if you wait long enough between upgrades.)
One of the nice things is that you can install many things without having to sudo - the build is run by a daemon and sandboxed. nix-shell can also be used to create a shell in which a given package set is installed - you can use that to use a piece of software as a one-off or create a development environment that doesn't pollute your general system. Tools like home-manager[0] can help with managing your home directory in a similar way to NixOS's management of your system, too - I have redis and postgres installed using home-manager to run as my own user on demand under systemctl.