Serpent OS Pre-Alpha-0 released

I don't know the author but it's worth keeping in mind that... Sometimes people end working on a project because

- it has no future, ran its course, proved wrong somehow

- cannot add more that others could do better

- an alternative makes more sense long term

It's true that many people end working on something because it gets too hard or they lack focus.

But in this case, seeing the breath of the projects, this is not the case.

I was a Solus user back when Ikey left. It was highly unusual, maintainer team had no insight, and frankly as a user it left a fairly bad taste.

But, Ikey had his reasons, and as I've grown up a bit over the years, I realize it is okay. Other maintainers picked up the tab pretty well, and for all its worth, quite a few of those maintainers have joined Ikey on this new distro, which signals a reconciliation.

Combined with other comments, I'd say what happened at Solus was imperfect, could have been communicated better, but probably still couldn't be avoided. Such is life.

This is true, there are already a plenty of imperative distros to choose from and they offer more or less similar experience. If I ever want to switch to something else, this would be NixOS or another declarative one.

No idea. It seems to have gone off in the direction of "shiny and new" without deeply considering more practical architectural decisions like isolating system vs. userland, configuration management, or manageability. It's unfortunate because there are zillions of Linux distros, and most of them (numerically) are terrible, insanely impractical, user hostile, and/or poorly documented. If you're going to create a distro, at least have a use-case justification for it where other distros or other OSes ([wd]o|ca)n't meet the needs of them adequately.

> Why someone would want an imperative distro over a declaratively configured one?

Perhaps most people are not aware of the difference or why it should matter?

After years of reading and study I only have a vague and hazy understanding of functional vs imperative languages, and what one can do in a functional language.

I have not seen any project built around functional programming that really makes a serious effort to explain why it is different or why anyone should care. My overall impression is that most take the attitude of IYKYK -- "if you know, you know" -- and don't even try.

While this is an understandable response to years of incomprehension and lack of interest, it's still a poor response.

I have spent _hours_ talking with Nix folks trying to get a better understanding and for the most part I have failed.

I would guesstimate that 99% of programmers do not understand FP vs imperative programming and so neither know nor care about FP.

So when the definition of efforts such as Nix and Guix is "we specify configuration using a pure functional language", most readers won't know or care what that means.

The Reddit-ism of "explain it like I'm 5" is a powerful criterion.

I look for people who can give me clear, simple, lucid explanations of what their software is and how it works. When nobody can, I tend to suspect that the software is either not much general use, or that advocacy for it is not based on facts and understanding but by clan loyalty.

Projects which few people can cogently clearly explain to me without jargon and bafflegab include Kubernetes, OStree, and OpenShift. It is, notably, a hallmark of Red Hat, and I speak as a former employee. I was hired to work on one product's documentation. I found that nobody in the company could explain what the product was or did, until I met the 1 person who came from the company that wrote it and which RH acquired.

I think I have an extremely sketchy understanding of the point of Nix and I have tried to explain it, but I am sure it is a weak, poor understanding.

More effort to explain what it means and why it matters would go a long way.

If people were clearly told what "declarative configuration" meant, what it was and what it did and how it worked and why they might want it, then maybe they would care.

I suspect, but do not know, that most do not.

Because most real-world problems are subject to hysteresis [1], and declarative systems fail very badly at modeling history.

A very simple example:

* install a server program, which for security is run as a dedicated (newly-created) user

* run the server program, which generates logs owned by that user.

* uninstall the server program - but the user must not be deleted while the log files exist

This example is simple enough that many declarative systems don't require too much massaging to handle it, but many more complicated examples exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis

Beta is typically close to feature complete.

Alpha is basically not close to feature complete.

Pre-alpha is check this out but here be dragons! For an OS it makes sense, seeing failure typically means a hard reboot.

For the level of development I would consider preAlpha, I would count myself lucky if it built on any given night.

I think of it as, "hey, this one doesn't immediately implode. Let's let people look at it"

linux (the kernel) supports "Kernel Live Patching" and several distros provide the updates to do it

I'm pretty sure it is a Linux distro, if slightly unusual userspace.

> We're creating Serpent OS, an independent Linux distribution built from the ground up to look after itself.

Nix is declarative, this one is imperative.