Here’s a new tool with strong potential that will appeal to advanced Arch users, especially those who miss a NixOS-style approach to system management (or who are DevOps-oriented). I’m talking about Decman, which has reached its first stable 1.0 release.
Here’s what you can do with it. Decman manages an Arch Linux installation by enforcing a declared system state (written directly in Python) instead of applying changes imperatively.
In a simple configuration, you specify which packages must be installed, which configuration files must exist and their contents, which systemd services must be enabled, and which tools, such as Flatpak or AUR helpers, are in use. This definition is the source of truth.
Mhmm, better than nothing, NixOs does this job but is an entirely different ecosystem that has their own problems even if its so good.
I’m dying for this sort of thing to be on debian.
It’s the reason I switched to NixOS - I can’t pin for shit in Debian, and I’m stuck at whatever version they want things to be (like ye olde git). Some programs I just want to be bleeding edge, the rest I don’t care much about (unless it breaks).
Meanwhile, I can pin things in Cargo (Rust), and uv (Python) just fine, which is why it stings so hard that Debian doesn’t have it :(