[nickpsecurity]

NixOS is one of the few distros that recognizes and solves this problem:

https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html

A solution like theirs should become the default. Their transactional, package management too given the number of times my Linux packages got broken by some ridiculous crap. That even a smaller outfit could knock out two problems, one major, shows these bigger distros could be gradually knocking out such issues themselves.

[aidenn0]

It's a lot more work to retroactively impose a new FS layout on an existing distribution than to come up with a new distribution.

If e.g. Ubuntu did this then

1) They'd have to fix all of the packages in the main repository, and then PPAs?

2) Lots of third party software targeted on Ubuntu would break; this would cause a lot of users to want to stay on pre-change versions of Ubuntu, which probably means it would get forked.

[nickpsecurity]

"They'd have to fix all of the packages in the main repository, and then PPAs?"

The NixOS site made it look like they didn't have to do that with their solution: just give a meta-view on what's already there for the users.

"Lots of third party software targeted on Ubuntu would break; this would cause a lot of users to want to stay on pre-change versions of Ubuntu, which probably means it would get forked."

This could happen with any number of changes. Might still be worth it for at least major changes like making broken packages recoverable. I can't imagine myself getting off Ubuntu just because package failures can't brick my system anymore. Some developers might gripe about having to make changes but that makes them look like assholes, not Ubuntu.

I mean, VMS had this feature in the 80's with their versioned filesystem and transactions at app level. It's about time at least the package managers of Linux can do same reliably for apps. At least one of them did to their credit.

[Mathnerd314]

1) A lot of Ubuntu (really Debian's) packages are ancient software that nobody uses. That being said, some packages are not, and there is usually a bit of effort needed to get them to work. OTOH NixOS is still growing, whereas Debian is declining (Ubuntu might pick up the slack, but it's not clear)

2) Most third-party software is indeed broken out-of-the-box on NixOS; but patchelf and fhsuserenv have been developed so that it can run regardless (there's steam, flash, adobe reader... all patched to work. Running a .deb is as hard as specifying all of its dependencies).

[orik]

I was about to ask if any BSD's handle this better, great to see that NixOS does.

[gkya]

In FreeBSD the base system stuff goes into /bin /lib and /etc, and all the ports target /usr/local as the prefix. Even the config files of the ports go to /usr/local/etc.

[soupbowl]

I really like how freebsd does it, nixos has me interested too.

[gkya]

Though NixOS and Guix form a different approach than the FreeBSD's, that is they treat packages as isolated immutable objects and use an unconventional directory layout (wanted to note this, because someone who doesn't know the OSs named may have thought that FreeBSD and NixOS/Guix approaches are similar).

[CMCDragonkai]

You don't lose anything too, you can still imperatively build packages if necessary.

[nickpsecurity]

What do you mean? That sentence can read a few ways.