More specifically, issues for one distro (or maybe family of distros if applicable) and not other distros.

I’ll start: NixOS. I love how I can have my whole operating system configuration defined deterministically with configuration files, but what I believe is a serious flaw, is when you choose the “unstable” channel, the channel for receiving the latest packages rather than ones up to 6 months old: stable. Unstable package often build dependencies on device, and I’ve often faced build failures, why are new package versions given if they fail to build?!

Why can’t Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so, but I can’t think of any other distros that have this problem: where installing a new package version that came out a few days or even a week ago, has a chance of failing after its made available in the distro’s official package manager.

There are a handful of workarounds for your NixOS configuration in this case, but it happens too often for me and I shouldn’t have to edit my config for to work around it.

  • Augmented1207@feddit.org
    1·
    2 hours ago

    KDE neon on both laptop and desktop can be buggy. Discover does not open reliably, dolphin crashes randomly (in certain directories) and the display manager crashes and restarts sometimes. Idk why, super annoying and could not find a solution yet.

  • Zachariah@lemmy.world
    7·
    15 hours ago

    Ubuntu distros really need a ridiculously simple way both via cli and gui to disable snaps.And it needs to be respected through updates and upgrades.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
    3·
    13 hours ago

    Are you sure you aren’t either applying nixpkgs overlays, or following master instead of nixos-unstable? I’ve not really experienced anything like you’ve described.

    Anyways - I’ve additionally built my own cache server, which builds every output of my flake every time I push to main. System updates are ONLY downloads now. Also allowed all of my low-powered VMs to auto-update, since they’ll never need to build anything at all.

  • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    3·
    13 hours ago

    Not being able to install non-flatpak and non-AppImage programs on an immutable OS like SteamOS without changes getting rolled back.

  • Digit@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    14 hours ago

    Which of the at least 4 places you posted this do you want replied to? n_n

    … Actually, I got nuthin. No distro-specific problems at all are standing out to me as worth mentioning.

  • UNY0N@feddit.org
    4·
    16 hours ago

    I have been using bazzite for a while, and I’m quite happy with it, especially in the respect that it just does not break, ever.

    But not can it be frustrating sometimes to install things that have no flatpak or appimage.

    That being said, there are a lot of ways to get around this, homebrew and distrobox, etc. And its also not something the deva are sound wrong, it’s just part of the deal with immutable distros. Will frustrating at times though.

    • illusionist@lemmy.zip
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Yes it is frustrating but once you know that you can just enter a box and export the app, it’s not too annoying anymore.

      I don’t feel a difference on opensuse aeon with vscode in a box.

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2·
    11 hours ago

    slackware: ships libraries too old (python3.9, openssl1.1.1, … - this is on the latest stable, released early 2022)

    i hope they get a new release soon, as the kernel is going EoL soon as well (5.15)

  • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    Why can’t Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so

    It’s the kind of work that can be automated. Most of the Gentoo tinderbox build-everything-in-the-tree-and-file-bugs-on-failure projects (there have been several over the years) have been run by a single dev. I’d assume that Nix could do the same.

    Issues with Gentoo? The only one I’ve encountered that I didn’t sign up for is the occasional difficulty finding documentation for some obscure and unpopular option, like downgrading the freetype interpreter to make it render pixel-aligned fonts the way I want it to, or bridging networks in qemu to allow a VM to address other machines on the LAN without systemd or NetworkManager (still trying to figure that one out). With Gentoo, unlike some other distros, you really need documentation—it isn’t going to enumerate the possibilities in a dropdown.