NixOS 21.05 • Hacker News Board

Re: NixOS 21.05

#101

Post by OhSoHumble » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #53

rkangel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly - how painful was it to learn and get working? And what limitations/niggles are left when using as a workstation? I love the principles behind Nix, and I like to use it to provide development environments (through nix-shell locally and then using the same setup in CI). But some things can be moderately painful to get going.

You're looking at a solid 10-20 hours of hacking stuff together to get a decent working system, and you still won't understand a good 80% of what you copied from various repos. I've been using NixOS for a year now, and I have a definite love/hate relationship. Many times I miss the simplicity of Arch, where I understood _everything_ about my system and how it was configured. NixOS is like learning everything all over…

This is where I'm sitting right now. I'm trying out Void Linux on my laptop and it's just so simple. I love that I understand my system. I look at Nix as a language and I just have no idea what is going on.

What I'd really like, as a learning resource, is a "Nix for apt/yum users" or a "Nix for Ansible" users guide. There is the cheat sheet (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Cheatsheet) but it's just not enough.

For example, I wanted to just... create an arbitrary directory in my home directory (~/workspace). Does Home Manager do this? If so, how? Do I just have a shell script that is called within a package? That seems excessive. Is this not a use case for Nix? It looks like it can do arbitrary tasks across the system but the documentation is so bogged down with theory that it takes forever to find practical applications.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#102

Post by deckard1 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

I must admit, I'm curious about the idea but I don't yet "get" it.

Reproducible builds sound like a great idea at first, but this has the same problem as Docker containers: you inadvertently become a package/distro maintainer. How does one update the system regularly with security updates? Are we locking by semver somehow (like node, etc.)? And who decides which version ranges to lock to, etc. etc.?

Honestly, I'd probably much rather just take an existing Debian/Redhat/etc. LTS distro and do a custom install script, which isn't that hard in the first place.

And, in case of cloud server environments, you can just take a snapshot of your VM with a simple click of a button. You can't get much more reproducible than an actual snapshot of your entire system.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#103

Post by gmfawcett » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

Sleepytime wrote: post #69

Nullabillity wrote: post #37

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? Kind of. It works very well if you own multiple computers that you want to be configured similarly (like a dotfiles repo on steroids). It doesn't work so well for I borrowed my cowo…

>It doesn't work so well for I borrowed my coworker's computer for 5 minutes and want to use my own Vim configuration You could use something like nixos-shell[1] to spin up a headless VM of your machine into your current shell. [1] https://github.com/Mic92/nixos-shell

Well that is pretty neat. Thanks for the mention of nixos-shell. I've been a NixOS daily-driver for the past 6 months or so, but I am still picking up new ideas on a daily basis. :)

Re: NixOS 21.05

#104

Post by toastal » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

rgoulter wrote: post #17

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...

For the use case of developer machines, NixOS is much more friction compared to other OSs. It's not about how nice Nix stuff is when it works. It's about how much of a pain it is to get things working when things aren't nice and you don't know what to do. With other popular distributions, you can rely on being able to find a StackOverflow answer with whatever your error message is. Most other OSs and package managers…

There would be less friction if say NPM and package managers like these weren't installing files in random places, assuming locations of files/binaries instead of querying, let libraries and binaries be configurable, and/or not following the XDG spec. This is probably what developers should be doing, but many can't be asked to understand Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distro.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#105

Post by sph » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote: post #87

sph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nix and similar projects are all going to be eaten alive by immutable distributions, Flatpak and new projects - that might work just like Nix but get the user experience right, and make packaging and maintenance easier. And no I'm not saying they do the exact same thing, have all the same features or target the same type of users. For the developer tools side I like what Shopify did but I would never recommend that t…

I'm out of the loop, what did Shopify do?

EDIT: ah, you're probably talking about https://shopify.engineering/shipit-presents-how-shopify-uses...

Re: NixOS 21.05

#106

Post by mason55 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #85

mason55 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the escape hatch doesn't get you any real benefits. It's not like you can install packages from apt/yum/aur so you don't get access to any new software (plus nixpkgs is bigger than all those). All it does is result in confusing tutorials that hide the benefits of declarative management and make it difficult for new users who just want to get things working.

> It's not like you can install packages from apt/yum/aur Yes you can. Here's a Nix derivation which makes a Debian chroot and runs 'apt-get update; apt-get install -y chromium' https://github.com/Warbo/warbo-utilities/blob/7087c3b46a97f3... Here a Nix derivation for a helper script that runs the above chromium: https://github.com/Warbo/warbo-utilities/blob/7087c3b46a97f3... On a similar note, here's a Nix derivation…

Oh yeah, great point! I was thinking of installing packages from apt/yum/aur directly with something like nix-env, but you're right, there's no reason you can't just use apt-get directly.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#107

Post by m45t3r » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

OhSoHumble wrote: post #101

nvarsj wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking at a solid 10-20 hours of hacking stuff together to get a decent working system, and you still won't understand a good 80% of what you copied from various repos. I've been using NixOS for a year now, and I have a definite love/hate relationship. Many times I miss the simplicity of Arch, where I understood _everything_ about my system and how it was configured. NixOS is like learning everything all over…

This is where I'm sitting right now. I'm trying out Void Linux on my laptop and it's just so simple. I love that I understand my system. I look at Nix as a language and I just have no idea what is going on. What I'd really like, as a learning resource, is a "Nix for apt/yum users" or a "Nix for Ansible" users guide. There is the cheat sheet ( https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Cheatsheet ) but it's just not enough. For example,…

> For example, I wanted to just... create an arbitrary directory in my home directory (~/workspace). Does Home Manager do this? If so, how? Do I just have a shell script that is called within a package? That seems excessive. Is this not a use case for Nix? It looks like it can do arbitrary tasks across the system but the documentation is so bogged down with theory that it takes forever to find practical applications.

You are definitively trying to do too much at the same time. Before using Home-Manager (that is a community project, it is not endorsed by NixOS except by allowing to be hosted on the nix-community group on GitHub), I stayed at two years playing with only NixOS. It is only after I got comfortable with Nix and NixOS that I decided to migrate my configuration to Home-Manager. Not saying that you need that much time to use HM, just that HM assumes that you're know a reasonable good amount about Nix and NixOS.

So I would say, start with less: try NixOS first, it is kinda easy to use compared to other "advanced" Linux distros like Arch and Void. The easy things are really easy, the hard things can be really hard at first but I don't think you need to know much about Nix to be proeficient on NixOS nowadays. Also yeah, you will need to search some things, but since the scope is reduced it is easier to find answers.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#108

Post by mason55 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

bemeurer wrote: post #88

lloeki wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how painful was it to learn and get working? nixpkgs (which you can use on macOS or any Linux distro), quite little, you can get up to speed in 15min as a Homebrew replacement: nix-env -qas ruby # 'q'uery 'a'vailable 'search' nix-env -I ruby. # install by package name (not recommended) nix-env -iA nixpkgs.ruby_3_0 # install by "attribute", recommended nix-env -q # 'q'uery (i.e list installed) nix-env -e ruby # unin…

Please don't recommend that people use nix-env. It's one of Nix's biggest footguns and a huge support burden for the maintainers. We've been actively trying to remove mentions of it from the documentation. If you want something "installed" use home-manager. If you just want something for quick dev use nix-shell.

I'm so glad this is the official line now. People giving examples using nix-env -I is, IMO, one of the major reasons it's so hard to get up and running.

It's like... here are all the amazing reasons to do declarative config... and here's how you do everything using nix-env -I. Good luck figuring out how to translate it into a NixOS config so you can get all the benefits of declarative config that we just described!

Re: NixOS 21.05

#109

Post by soraminazuki » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #66

I ran Nixos for a few months from Dec 25 to Mar 12 of this year. During that time there were 2 zero-day exploits published for Chrome that went unpatched for weeks on Nixos. (Specifically the package named google-chrome went unpatched.) This was on the "unstable" branch of Nixos, the branch that became the stable branch today, which is the occasion of this story on HN we are commenting on. Digression: the reason I ch…

For anyone willing to help the Nix project, there's a script[1] you can use in the Nixpkgs repo to update the official Nix package for Chrome. If you ever feel that Chrome needs to be updated immediately, you can help out by running this script and opening a PR.

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...

---

Now, back to point, security issues are not "neglected" in NixOS, and most of the points made are simply not true. Security vulnerabilities are rounded up on a regular basis. However, like many open source projects, Nix is mostly being worked on by volunteers and I don't believe it's fair to spread doubts just because they don't get fixed in a day or two.

Let me also clarify the remaining points.

First, the parent comment alleges that the Chrome package in Nixpkgs has been neglected. This is not the case. Looking at the commit logs[2], the Chrome package has been updated on a frequent basis "from Dec 25 to Mar 12 of this year."

Second, the parent comment argues that installing your preferred version of Chrome is "distressingly" impossible. Again, this is false. Installing your preferred version of Chrome using Nix is as simple as supplying an alternative upstream URL for the google-chrome package. This happens to be one of the major selling point of Nix, how it makes it easier to reuse and customize existing package definitions without friction.

[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits/master/pkgs/applica...

Re: NixOS 21.05

#110

Post by kaba0 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

toastal wrote: post #100

Jiocus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doh! You're right, I completely forgot that. Thanks for pointing it out.

I tried this on my previous laptop and ran into a number of issues once I tried to install anything with a GUI. It's fine for shells and CLI tools though. I migrated some configs over to a Nix configs under Arch, and while it was a pain to initially set up NixOS (unfamilarity), it's a lot easier doing everything else now.

Yeah, I’m not sure how up-to-date my knowledge is, but opengl and the like are exceptions to the usual deterministic handling of dependencies on non-NixOS distros (not because it is unable to do so, I think it is mainly to avoid storing everything n-times with nvidia/amd), and one has to specify them. It was quite a time I ran nix on a non-nixos distro but there is this tool https://github.com/guibou/nixGL that meant to solve the issue of graphical programs.