void-packages VS nixpkgs

I was looking for a lightweight OS to run on old Asus Eee PC 1005 HA, which uses a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 processor. I installed Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/).

I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.

Linux Void

My computer is running Void Linux and it has only a wired network connection. I can hook up my phone for USB tethering if I need to connect to the WiFi of the ESP32. How do I update the software without downloading some shady programs from filesharing site links on my system? I have the Arduino IDE and the esptool.py script installed.

Classic "everyone is using the software wrong, but it's the fault of everyone, and not the software".

Some distros like Void seem to patch this out.[1]

From mandoc/mdocml's mandoc_char(7) [2]

In roff(7) documents, the minus sign is normally written as ‘\-’. In manual pages, some style guides recommend to also use ‘\-’ if an ASCII 0x2d “hyphen-minus” output glyph that can be copied and pasted is desired in output modes supporting it, for example in -T utf8 and -T html. But currently, no practically relevant manual page formatter requires that subtlety, so in manual pages, it is sufficient to write plain ‘-’ to represent hyphen, minus, and hyphen-minus.

Which is the common-sense thing to do.

Meanwhile, GNU projects become increasingly less relevant due to obnoxiousness like this.

In general the amount of wankery of "the correct hyphen" is staggering.

[1]: https://man.openbsd.org/mandoc_char

[2]: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/20c66829134...

So I was about to configure a new Archlinux build on my PC and came across Void Linux. I had already read about it a year ago but never researched it in depth. I know that is a Linux distribution made from scratch, with a different package manager and so on. Void Linux users or people who have tried it, what are your thoughts on it? Do you think the PM is easy to use? what about updates and bugs? what desktop or Tilling Window Manager do you use? could you tell me about it?

Good news about dbus-next: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/46760

I don't think so. The article is probably intended for the Nix community, so the author doesn't need to convince HN that something is going on. If as an outsider you are interested then you need to look into it yourself, the community has no obligation to make their internal conflicts legible to the outside world.

As an outsider myself, it certainly looks like something is going on as more than 20 Nixpkg maintainers left in a week: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=label%3A%228.has%3...

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset

I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors

For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...

For example,

```

Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...

I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...

NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.

I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.

Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

In this specific case, nix uses fetchFromGitHub to download the source archive, which are generated by GitHub for the specified revision[1]. Arch seems to just download the tarball from the releases page[2].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3c2fdd0a4e6396fc310a6e...

[2]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ib...