Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.

What would you change?

  • nycki@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is “I just want to install a package”; its like exiting vim all over again.

    edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to pacman -Sy or whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can’t in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don’t want to use an OS I wouldn’t recommend to others.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Yeah, I don’t understand how you could make installing vim simpler than pacman -S vim? Is it about “-S” being less obvious than “install”?

      • nycki@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I’ve also seen it as pacman -Sy and pacman -Syu and so on. I really just think “install” should be a subcommand, not a flag. That’s really my only issue I guess, I’ve only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.

    • ccdfa@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      What’s complex about pacman? I’ve found pacman to be more reliable and easier to manage than apt, so I’m just curious about your experience

      • nycki@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with “pacman -S” (or is it “pacman -Sy”?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with “nix-env -iA”. I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, “npm install foo” both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.