priapus

Agreed. I doubt he expected the project to be anywhere near this popular considering how many Firefox forks there are, and he's been doing a great job keeping up with everything that popularity comes with.

That comment about their security updates is a couple of months old. Zen has made significant changes to how they handle releases to stay up to date with Firefox, some of which were mentioned in the thread.

The Nix package is functional. Nixpkgs sometimes chooses not to add beta software that is receiving very frequent updates, especially if the package takes a lot of resources to build. In those cases, it makes more sense for the package to be maintained outside Nixpkgs for the time being. NixOS users can get Zen from this Flake, which patches the official binary. COSMIC Desktop is another example of this.

Pages not looking sharp sounds like it's probably a font or scaling issue.

Not sure what you mean by Zen being a skin. Its a fork in the same way Librewolf and Waterfox are forks.

Check out Cartridges. It's simpler than Playnite, but works great for just seeing all your games in one place.

Cartridges does this

Maybe my systems aren't exotic enough to experience the uncommon breakages.

The majority of issues are caused by Python applications, because Python packaging in Nix is still very rough. This isn't Nix's fault though, its the fact that pip sucks and most Python software uses a simple requirements.txt. Hopefully one day Poetry and UV build helpers will be in Nixpkgs.

You have to be active in the community to get your work merged in any decent timeframe. I think this is the most annoying part about the Nix ecosystem.

Definitely agree. It can be hard to get things merged or even reviewed. The simplest option to improve this would be to give more people write access, but of course lowering requirements for getting it would be a risk for security and stability. Nixpkgs automation is frequently improving, which will definitely help.

I didn't say or imply that NixOS is worse than other distros overall. I am also a maintainer of several packages, but I am referring to those with Nixpkgs write access, who generally have a deeper understanding of the repo.

Shit usually works, but not always. Breakages on unstable are not uncommon. For example, things often break when a major Python package is updated. The auto generated packages in Nixpkgs are often broken, sometimes completely, but sometimes in ways you don't realize until you're using them. Nixpkgs just does not have a review process that is on par with other distros.

I agree that NixOS configuration is amazing, that's not what I was talking about. Im not shit talking NixOS, I love Nix and have used and contributed to it for years. I'm just bringing up valid points about it that are worth talking about.

I agree that Nix handles broken packages much better than Arch, but that's more on the package managers themselves than the quality of packages.

NixOS Unstable has fairly frequent package breakages, especially for Python applications or packages using autogenerated dependencies. There are also many unmaintained packages. These unmaintained packages often get updated automatically without being tested, breaking them. Without a maintainer, some of these take a bit to be fixed.

I do think Nixpkgs packages are on average higher quality than AUR packages, they are just not up to the standards of many other repos official packages. Also, to be clear, I'm not hating on Nix or anything, I love Nix and NixOS is and has been my distro of choice for years.

That doesn't change hero shooters being a subgenre and many of them having nothing in common. Of course I wasn't saying two hero shooters can't be similar and directly compete, I was just saying that two games being hero shooters does not make them similar.

Comparing Valorant to Apex to Overwatch doesn't make much sense, they all play very differently and are different genres, even if they all share the hero shooter subgenre.

The entire idea of hero shooters was born from combining MOBA and shooter mechanics, so I just find it weird to compare Deadlock to these games when it is primarily a MOBA.

Honestly I just hate how much people compare games in general. Some games, like Rivals and Overwatch, deserve to be compared, but most games are trying to do their own thing. People acted like Deadlock was Valves take on Overwatch when the games don't play remotely similar besides having a hero select screen and abilities - two things that first game from MOBAs.

Rollbacks are definitely something worth talking about, but the package count is probably not.

Nixpkgs automatically generated packages from some language specific package managers, mainly Haskell and Node packages, which do hugely inflate the number. If you account for these, it does end up being smaller than the AUR. Plus, many of those automatically generated packages are frequently broken.

This still leaves Nixpkgs as the largest official repo, but I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package. Package review processes are not nearly as intensive as they probably should be due to the lack of manpower to handle that..

Edit: To be clear, since my tone seemed very negative here, I am not just trying to spread negativity about NixOS. I've used NixOS for years and contributed to plenty of Nix projects in the time. It is without a doubt the best package manager atm and its ideas have had massive positive impacts on package management as a whole.

That is true, but most NixOS contributors and maintainers would agree that the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros. However, there is the upside that because of how dependencies are handled, a broken package won't mess with other things on your system in the same way a broken AUR package could.

Bazzite is great. Definitely the best distro for gamers new to Linux.