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My experience with NixOS

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Re: My experience with NixOS

#31

Post by zymhan »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #6
dragonsh wrote: post #2

NixOS is good, if you found not enough documentation, try Guix and may be GuixSD. It uses guile (scheme) and has fantastic documentation. [1] Earlier Nix had additional NixOps but that too now is available with Guix deploy. I am waiting when I can run Guix within a lxd container, shepherd init still has some rough edges with LXD container init. Both are great piece of software and a new take on building OS and distri…

Our organization tried Nix for many years. Most of our problems were around usability, lack of documentation (including zero docstrings or type annotations in nixpkgs), and the overt unfamiliarity of the Nix expression language (asking a whole organization to learn something that seems deliberately cryptic isn't a recipe for success), and a long tail of other things. Still, at its core Nix for package management seem…

I worked at the company that "started" Nix, and I can assure you that we had those same issues internally, even when the whole Nix dev team was on our payroll.

Re: My experience with NixOS

#32

Post by rudolph9 »

I recently switched to NixOS and have essentially configured my OS from scratch in less than a week and now use it as my main system.

The thing to remember about NixOS is it’s not a distribution of KDE or Gnome or manager of anything, it’s a declarative way of configuring those things and allows you to easily roll back changes to entire OS.

It’s a little bit of investment to get started but one you get rolling it’s such a breath of fresh air to be able to manipulate your whole OS in the similar pragmatic way to you iterate code in a git repo.

Re: My experience with NixOS

#33

Post by rudolph9 »

mbakke wrote: post #29
dragonsh wrote: post #2

NixOS is good, if you found not enough documentation, try Guix and may be GuixSD. It uses guile (scheme) and has fantastic documentation. [1] Earlier Nix had additional NixOps but that too now is available with Guix deploy. I am waiting when I can run Guix within a lxd container, shepherd init still has some rough edges with LXD container init. Both are great piece of software and a new take on building OS and distri…

GNU Guix 1.1.0 was released just hours ago, so now is a good time to try it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877788 :-) Rumor has it that Guix will be included in a future Debian release too. It is already available in Arch, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE.

It’s really great that functional package managers are getting all this attention! Nix package manager can run on Arch and Gentoo and OpenSUSE also.

Re: My experience with NixOS

#34

Post by ymse »

rudolph9 wrote: post #33
mbakke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU Guix 1.1.0 was released just hours ago, so now is a good time to try it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877788 :-) Rumor has it that Guix will be included in a future Debian release too. It is already available in Arch, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE.

It’s really great that functional package managers are getting all this attention! Nix package manager can run on Arch and Gentoo and OpenSUSE also.

It's one of the things you just can't do without once you become accustomed to it. I can not imagine going back to needing root privileges just to install or try a package, or being unable to roll back to earlier revisions.

I hear Nix even works on macOS too! :-)

Re: My experience with NixOS

#37

Post by ghuntley »

ghuntley wrote: post #36

Here's my dotfiles for some of my nixos servers and home computers. https://github.com/ghuntley/dotfiles-nixos Steal away and enjoy.

Check out the NixOS for existing sysadmins workshop over at — https://github.com/ghuntley/workshops/tree/master/nixos-work...

If you want a TL;DR overview of NixOS then start here — https://github.com/ghuntley/workshops/tree/master/nixos-work...

For an advanced example of overriding nixpkg and usage of pinning/override layers (ie some mandate or reason to run super old version of grpc) — https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/blob/master/nix/nixpkg...

Re: My experience with NixOS

#38

Post by tbenst »

DethNinja wrote: post #35

Could someone summarise what is the advantage of NixOS compared to something like Ansible or Saltstack + any other Linux distribution?

I used a Ansible for years before switching to NixOS. The problem with ansible is it is an imperative configuration tool that makes efforts to be declarative, but is not fully. Most runs fail to be declarative, eg even something as basic as “apt update” is irreversible. Ultimately, Ansible requires you to write code that is (State, Code) -> New State, whereas NixOS is truly Code -> State

Re: My experience with NixOS

#39

Post by Zinggi »

golergka wrote: post #7

I'm yet to see a backend app architecture that both is elegant and effective from developer perspective and at the same time doesn't push her to make unneccessary database calls for each request when business logic becomes significantly complex.

You might be interested in lamdera. It abstracts away database access, data transport and data encoding between client end server. Here is a talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSrucNcwlA8

If you're interested, you can probably get an invite from @supermario on the elm slack, or on: https://lamdera.app/

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the project, but I've met Mario in person and he's a cool dude with great ideas ;)

Re: My experience with NixOS

#40

Post by jordanbeiber »

DethNinja wrote: post #35

Could someone summarise what is the advantage of NixOS compared to something like Ansible or Saltstack + any other Linux distribution?

NixPkgs amongst other things replace rpm/deb packages - and having a package install declared in a git repo is awesome compared to installing a pre-packaged compressed blob.

Nixos keeps the entire system state based on a declaration and lets you move back/forward on whole system configurations super quick.

Ansible and salt does not really declare a complete system state but rather try to manipulate the underlying system. Ansible keeps no state at all actually.

Nixos+pkg is all about declaring and keeping a state of a machine as much as reasonably possible. It has it’s flaws but the end result is still much more coherent and predictable compared to traditional configuration management.

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