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NixOS 21.05

nixos.org

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Re: NixOS 21.05

#21

Post by sph »

__jem wrote: post #7

I recently moved back to Arch from NixOS. I really love the idea, and the execution isn't necessarily bad, but it didn't make sense for me on the desktop. Straying off the beaten path quickly led to the sense that I was going to have to learn way more about Nix than I wanted to. I hope the documentation and community grows, because I definitely got the sense that it is the future arriving early!

The documentation and the nix language are the worst things about the project IMO. I really hope Guix succeeds because Scheme is, in my opinion, a better DSL and language than this weird, not very well documented, Haskell-like derivative.

Unless you've drank the kool-aid, you have to learn a completely new operating system and way of doing things, a weird language that's lacking on documentation, and a ton of system or package-specific options that are even less documented, and requires you to spend too much time reading the source to understand what's going on and how to achieve something a little off the beaten path.

Feels a bit cultish IMO, and that only the illuminated ones are able to grok it. That it's my fault I'm not prepared to do the work and see for myself why NixOS is better than any other distro.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#22

Post by mason55 »

alias_neo wrote: post #12
nitsky wrote: post #4

I recently moved my laptop, desktop, and a few servers from Arch Linux to NixOS with flakes and home-manager. It is amazing! The complete configuration for all machines is in a single git repository, I can share configuration between them, and a `flake.lock` file guarantees all machines are using the same version of everything. No more trying to remember what command I need to run to install and configure software an…

So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from? Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration? So I could do this in RAM on someone else's hardware, like a network boot?

> So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from?

Yes, and you can specify your .vimrc, your vim plugins, the users you want setup, their SSH keys, your systemd config, etc.

> Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration?

Bootstrapping a system is the one place where you still need to do a bit of work, but it's not bad.

I personally have a script in my Nix config repo which pulls my config down to disk, sets up symlinks, and then switches to the new config. From there everything then goes through standard Nix tooling.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#23

Post by larusso »

rkangel wrote: post #11
xemoka wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can’t quite figure out why it’s not more popular... then again, I don’t use it either, sadly, because it’s not as popular as I feel it deserves; I feel like there must be some reason it’s not used more, so in turn haven’t dedicated the time to learn it. Perhaps that’s cyclic...

It is great, but a bit painful to learn and get working for you. I like to use Nix to provide my development environments but that's often painful due to conflicts between the Nix approach and how the language package manager wants to work.

Yes this. I tried this a few times but always ended in me banging against some esoteric issue. For example I tried to nixify a project I had which needs ruby and node. If you think you can spin up any version of ruby you are mistaken. The project removes older versions from time to time. The wrapper to fetch the correct gems from nix to setup the nix-env had really hard problems when gems or npm packages started their own native builds.

I’m a huge fan of the project and will give it a try again at one point. But I decided for now to go fully manual with arch to get a better understanding of most components involved in Linux before using the automatic that is nix.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#24

Post by Filligree »

mason55 wrote: post #22
alias_neo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from? Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration? So I could do this in RAM on someone else's hardware, like a network boot?

> So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from? Yes, and you can specify your .vimrc, your vim plugins, the users you want setup, their SSH keys, your systemd config, etc. > Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration? Boot…

What you can relatively easily do is extend the 'installer' config with whatever you want to add there, for instance applications and a desktop environment.

It should be relatively straightforward to also mount /home from a separate USB stick partition, but I haven't tried.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#25

Post by e3bc54b2 »

I've been smitten by NixOS ever since I first tried it 2 years ago. Its the first carefree experience I've had with my system. As a side note, this result includes first tiny contributions of mine!

That said, I really hope the community gets their stuff together on Flakes. They're designated as experimental and official document doesn't recommend them, but all the cool kids are already using them everywhere and it is fracturing the efforts and alienating newcomers.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#26

Post by e3bc54b2 »

alias_neo wrote: post #12
nitsky wrote: post #4

I recently moved my laptop, desktop, and a few servers from Arch Linux to NixOS with flakes and home-manager. It is amazing! The complete configuration for all machines is in a single git repository, I can share configuration between them, and a `flake.lock` file guarantees all machines are using the same version of everything. No more trying to remember what command I need to run to install and configure software an…

So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from? Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration? So I could do this in RAM on someone else's hardware, like a network boot?

Alternative to what others have said, you can use your config to build a custom bootable ISO and use it to setup your new system. Comes very handy if you can't guarantee nice network for setup.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#27

Post by gugagore »

mason55 wrote: post #16
xemoka wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can’t quite figure out why it’s not more popular... then again, I don’t use it either, sadly, because it’s not as popular as I feel it deserves; I feel like there must be some reason it’s not used more, so in turn haven’t dedicated the time to learn it. Perhaps that’s cyclic...

IMO the biggest blocker is documentation. The best way to figure out how to do something is typically to search around in the nixpkgs/NixOS options for what you're trying to do, then go read the code. There's very little in the way of "here's a common task that new users want to do and here's the blessed way to do it." Even something that should be Nix's MAJOR selling point, like "create a single repo that configures…

It sounds like nix provides an escape hatch [1] out of the declarative framework into something imperative, e.g. running `apt install $package`. And that seems like it would really ease adoption, since I would assume that it would allow a gradual adoption of the declarative mindset.

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?EscapeHatch

Re: NixOS 21.05

#28

Post by mekster »

res0nat0r wrote: post #14
CloselyChunky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share a link to your repo? This setup sounds interesting. Currently I have two separate repos for NixOS and home-manager.

I use nixpkgs on my osx laptop for most everything over homebrew these days, I've upgraded nix to 2.4, but home-manager isn't compatible. Hopefully that will change soon.

Good thing about nix package manager is that you can have same path using it on macOS and on Linux, so your shell config files are easier to maintain without if's.

Linuxbrew installing at /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/ is a bit of a joke too.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#29

Post by alias_neo »

mason55 wrote: post #22
alias_neo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from? Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration? So I could do this in RAM on someone else's hardware, like a network boot?

> So if I understand correctly, I could declaratively specify my workstation, say I want vim, podman, codium, kubectl, curl, tmux, firefox, zettlr. I could put this in a configuration and have my workstation anywhere I can grab that from? Yes, and you can specify your .vimrc, your vim plugins, the users you want setup, their SSH keys, your systemd config, etc. > Is there some way I can boot-to-git-configuration? Boot…

Amazing thanks. I'm going to start taking a look at getting a simple configuration started with my basic setup, keys, shell, tmux config etc.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#30

Post by Jiocus »

nitsky wrote: post #4

I recently moved my laptop, desktop, and a few servers from Arch Linux to NixOS with flakes and home-manager. It is amazing! The complete configuration for all machines is in a single git repository, I can share configuration between them, and a `flake.lock` file guarantees all machines are using the same version of everything. No more trying to remember what command I need to run to install and configure software an…

Long time Arch user here but I'm growing more interested in NixOS by the day. I'm mainly “utilitarian” in my OS choice and other things being equal, Arch's AUR packages is what keeps me using it.

How does the Nix ecosystem compare with AUR? Would you still recommend making the switch?

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