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22 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 5 Jul 2023 \ on: With Nix, Bitcoin Projects can Accelerate Contributions and Deployment bitcoin
It's rare that I praise a bitcoin magazine article these days, but this one is worth reading. There has been some discussion on SN in the past about running a node on NixOS. I have been using it for the past 6 months, but haven't switched my node to it yet. I found it tough getting used to Nix at first. I'm pretty much a Linux novice anyway. After a short time I discovered its logic and simplicity. It's now my go to distro. One thing is true, though. Updates can take forever.
Seems a bit mad to use a source distro just for running some servers if you aren't doing dev/testing work with them as well and need 3, 4, ...6 different bleeding edge things installed at the same time. I used Gentoo for a while and it was fun during those days when GCC didn't do a good job in stock default settings for optimisation for memory, size and speed. Now, there's hardly any point, it mostly optimizes best for each things workload type.
If you like to be bleeding edge IMO the best for newbies is Manjaro. If you need a stable environment, Ubuntu 20.04, KDE or Gnome choose your poison (or budgie or xfce etc). If you want to run several servers, Ubuntu's multipass is looking pretty cool for jumping from a VM image to a deployed server, all of them able to be hot swapped and all that fun stuff.
The only glitch with Ubuntu 20 as a daily driver for me was its Git version predates SSH signing but with a newer version source code built and installed the rest of the system is great. Later versions of Ubuntu, and, basically everything involving Gnome and GTK is a mess and it's only just starting to look sane again with this year's release.
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NixOS lets operators pick how bleeding edge they want. In a release you will get compiled packages. If you pick a rolling release channel you will get compiled packages if they are cached, or it will be built from source if there is no cache from the Hydra build system.
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