I recently wrote about my experience using NixOS on my VPS [1]; it's truly a very different way of approaching systems administration and Nix is at the heart of it. While I think the Nix expression language has a negative impact on usability, Nix still ends up being a net gain for not only entire OSs, but also reproducible environments for packages on many other OSs.
What is Nix and why you should try it
11–20 of 201 posts
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having never used Nix before, I would like to know what kind of usability issues it faces. For me, the biggest one is that I can't use it at clients running a Windows shop. That's a blocker.
Primarily from my perspective... the entire package repo acts as one enormous program. Which is both good and bad. Its not that easy imo to create ad hoc packages or packaging scripts
I strongly disagree. Creating a Nix package is significantly easier than creating, e.g.: an Arch package, from my experience. packageOverrides is really nice too.
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#13"To deal with this nix provides the nix-shell utility which constructs an environment on demand and runs a new shell based on that environment."
I'm sure nix is cool but this sort of sounds like something we just end up using docker for these days (for better or worse).
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#14Gobolinux does something similar, and has been around for years: https://www.gobolinux.org/
It "does something similar" in the sense that it doesn't obey the FHS. NixOS is otherwise a pretty radically different approach AFAIK.
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#15I have recently started looking into Nix to solve the problem of dotfile deployment to new OSX workstations. When you get a new laptop, you clone your dotfiles, maybe symlink them to your home directory -- and then what? Nix solves this problem for me by coupling my dotfile deployment with the installation of the related software.
The learning curve has been absolutely tremendous, however. That said, the support on Freenode has been some of the best I've encountered in more than a decade.
https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#chap-package-management https://rycee.net/posts/2017-07-02-manage-your-home-with-nix...
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think biggest ones are i) nix command is a bit complex, but it's getting redesigned [1] & ii) nixpkg definitions sometimes contain a lot of cruft. I've found Guix and GuixSD, which are a GNU-blessed Guile Scheme-based reimplementation of Nix and NixOS, more aesthetically pleasing. Quite simple and elegant in fact. The major differences are that Guix DSLs are implemented on top of Scheme, whereas Nix uses a custom D…
Guix uses it’s own init system implemented in Scheme: Sheperd ( https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ ) Herd/Hurd is a kernel, not an init system, although since systemd is Linux only, using a different kernel implies using a non-systemd init system.
Shepherd is not a kernel, Hurd is, and shepherd page mentions a relation, that dmd/shepherd was developped closely to Hurd but it not the same thing.
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having never used Nix before, I would like to know what kind of usability issues it faces. For me, the biggest one is that I can't use it at clients running a Windows shop. That's a blocker.
I think biggest ones are i) nix command is a bit complex, but it's getting redesigned [1] & ii) nixpkg definitions sometimes contain a lot of cruft. I've found Guix and GuixSD, which are a GNU-blessed Guile Scheme-based reimplementation of Nix and NixOS, more aesthetically pleasing. Quite simple and elegant in fact. The major differences are that Guix DSLs are implemented on top of Scheme, whereas Nix uses a custom D…
For my practical reasons I can not use pure GNU distributions, I am not aware of easy community way to re use packages for other distro or something hacky like that. Not everyone have brainpower and time to build custom packages for rare distro, it is a shame, I really like Guix.
NixOS got some recepies for using not 100% libre software.
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#18Python solves this problem with "virtualenv", where the user creates a virtual environment and installs all programs and libraries into that environment. The user can have multiple virtual environments, and it is easy to switch between environments.
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#19I can vouch for the immense improvement Nix has made to my software development process. I use NixOS on my desktop and laptop. At the OS-level, it gets a lot of things right: reproducible, immutable system configs; lightweight containers; devops with declarative configs. At a software project level, nix-shell is an indispensible tool. Compilers and interpreters aren't even part of my system-wide config; instead each project has it's own shell.nix file that installs all dependencies I need on the fly without polluting system state or virtualization. Nix is a god-send, and the developers that contribute to it are nothing short of awesome!
The area that needs improvement is the documentation. Once you learn the Nix language, reading the source code is pretty helpful, but it would be nice to make it more approachable. For example, the nixpkgs repo has a bunch of Nix helper functions that are useful to developers when writing their own packages, but these functions' documentation is either buried in a long manual, or non-existent.
Re: What is Nix and why you should try it
#20Python solves this problem with "virtualenv", where the user creates a virtual environment and installs all programs and libraries into that environment. The user can have multiple virtual environments, and it is easy to switch between environments.
Up to a point. You can't install the c (etc) compiler in the venv, so you end up with some dependencies on the external system.