What are some things you wish you had known when switching to Linux?

elfahor@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Linux@lemmy.ml – 195 points –

I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it's the package manager.

176

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.

Installed distrobox on NixOS because I was worried being limited to only nixpkgs and have not touched it once lol

Same goes for the windows VM except for the time I needed to run excel macros for work

Worried about being limited to only the biggest selection of packages available. Does not compute.

I'd never heard of nixpkgs before so thought it was some small niche thing

I did on my Nix, there was a package in Nixpkgs that was outdated, so I had the opportunity to use distrobox for that, at leqst temporarily until they update the package.

Thats been a fear of mine moving to nixos. Glad to know it'll cover most of my software needs.

Here's a graph, it should be fine for your package needs: Graph

This is not totally accurate because nixpkgs also packages some packages that wouldn't be in the system package manager like Python and Haskell packages. Excluding those it's pretty much the same as the AUR

Am I reading the readme correctly in that I can run apt-get within distrobox on Fedora, and not be limited to dnf packages?

You can install Distrobox on Fedora (or any of the distros that support it), create a Debian distrobox on your Fedora install, and within the Debian distrobox you can use apt-get to install whichever Debian package you like. Or..., you could make an Arch distrobox and even install stuff from the AUR. Or really any package from any of your favorite distros as long as it's supported.

Awesome! And it'll be segregated from the base system and from other containers, like toolbox installs are?

And it’ll be segregated from the base system and from other containers, like toolbox installs are?

Exactly. It's even possible to segregate it beyond what Toolbx has been able to do (at least since the last time I checked) in that you can define another folder/directory as your HOME directory within the distrobox.

1 more...