[Nix-dev] "NixOS is an *experimental* Linux distribution"?

[Cillian de Róiste]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Marc Weber <marco-oweber at gmx.de> wrote:
> Excerpts from Cillian de R\xc3\xb3iste's message of Fri Feb 04 09:18:47 +0000 2011:

 -- snip --

> I'd say its still kind of experimental. Although some security updates
> happen I'm not sure that users of nixos watch all security issues the
> way its done for other distros - because they have a lot more users.
>
> Also a lot of things are experimental - eg the proprietary ati driver
> support for xorg.

That makes sense. However, I fear that people are turned off by the
word "experimental" since, in my opinion, it suggests  there isn't a
real future in the distro and that it is pre-alpha quality. I've never
used a distro that was without stability issues and random bugs e.g.
my Mandriva box completely froze this morning when printing!

> On my laptop I got freezes after several days of work - and
> occasionally resuming from pm-suspend doesn't work.
>
> I don't know how to debug it - because it only happens after 5 days of
> uptime or such.

I have exactly the same issue so I added a ticket (just now):
http://yellowgrass.org/issue/NixOS/122 I will collect some more
information about it and add it to the ticket but my gut feeling is
that an xorg update may help resolve it, although it's surely a bug
with the proprietary ati module.

Incidentally, co-workers who run Ubuntu on their laptops, which are
identical to mine, also have the same issue (I think) so they just
don't use suspend at all. The ati_unfree driver works better for me
(thanks to your help Marc!) under NixOS than it did under Debian
Lenny, where it flickered after resume, so perhaps this isn't the best
yardstick to measure NixOS by. I'm OK with rebooting every 5 days.

> If new users join a lot of "new packages" and proposals will come up
> which is good. But current commit policies without staging area are not.

-- snip --

I guess this is a separate issue, and I can't comment on the topic of
VCS, but perhaps I can infer that you agree the word "experimental"
serves as a deterrent. I wouldn't suggest that NixOS is ready for
casual desktop Linux users, but I fear that exactly the people who
would be most interested in a dependable system will be scared aware
immediately. My impression is that the experiment to create a distro
which has reliable upgrades, rollbacks and reproducible system
configuration can be considered a success and can be built upon with
confidence.

I assumed the text was written a long time ago and that it was an
oversight to not update it.

Cheers,
Cillian