After being frustrated by the tangle of .debs, Snap packages, and Flatpaks on my recently re-installed Ubuntu machine, I decided to try something new. I'd heard a fair amount of enthusiasm (and some controversy) for NixOS, so I decided to give it a try.

I hadn't done a lot of detailed reading on how NixOS is structured aside from the high-level "declarative configuration" claims (which did sound nice). I like that you can define a reproducible configuration in a couple of config files.

What I don't like is the lack of a standard LSB-style filesystem hierarchy. It could have been simulated with symlinks similar to the Debian "alternatives" approach, but the OS is firm that all of the libraries and executables need to be in NixOS-specific spots and any new libraries must be linked or re-linked against the same, essentially requiring a special configuration file for each one.

One thing that Nix (the packaging system) and thereby NixOS has going for it is a lot of dedicated users that have written many such configuration files, about 80,000 at current count. But as anyone who has ever forked a software project knows, custom work needs to be actively maintained, especially if the upstream project is active. I initially tried to use Nix packages where available but switched to Flatpak versions when the Nix packages were not up-to-date.

I reached my limit today when I was wrestling with getting Nix Python configs working with IDEA. I'm sure this works great if you're doing everything in the terminal, but I do not. It was time to move back to a more conventional distribution.

I spent the afternoon installing and setting up Pop!_OS (that underscore makes Obsidian unhappy). It's built on Ubuntu, and I do like Debian-based distributions. The configuration setup has been much smoother than with NixOS. It's nice to have a stable, well-supported distribution. It seems like Pop!_OS uses .debs with a fallback to Flatpaks, which was how I'd been handling oddball packages in both Ubuntu and NixOS. This is promising.

So far so good with Pop!_OS. The download was for an "LTS" tagged as being released in April of 2022, so I'm a little concerned that packages will be old. As a long-time Debian user, though, I'm used to working around ancient package versions. I also like that the maintainer, System76, is based in Denver, as am I! They seem like a good company, too.