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NixOS 21.05

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Re: NixOS 21.05

#151

Post by Mic92 »

takeda wrote: post #118
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…

Yes, it's extremely powerful once you truly understand Nix. There are efforts to improve documentation, but it still is lacking (I think the biggest problem is that Nix is so big, not just the OS but it can be utilized as a build system). Just with NixOS is not exactly clear how can you for example build your custom image. I think https://nix.dev/ is approaching the documentation from the right direction. There are a…

If you want to build custom images just use https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators It's documentation is on point.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#152

Post by tazjin »

_huayra_ wrote: post #46
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #25

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…

I really can't believe they didn't finalize Flakes in this release. The difference between it and the "standard" way of doing things is night-and-day. these sort of "secret better ways of doing things" that are not the default really frustrate and drive away new users

The problem with this is that flakes are currently an experiment, and one which many people in the community think has flaws that need another iteration.

Making it stable now locks Nix into the current flakes model forever - it's too early for that.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#153

Post by Nullabillity »

alias_neo wrote: post #137
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…

Ive seen mention to "switching" to a configuration a few times now, what does that mean technically? Is it a reboot and select a different grub option, does it take time/have to download things? What really is "switching"?

Building the new configuration (and downloading or building dependencies), adding the bootloader entry, and activating the new configuration (stopping removed services, starting new services, reloading changed services, that kind of thing).

You don't need to do all three: you can skip the bootloader if you want to try something temporarily, and you can skip activation if you want to wait with that until the next reboot. There are also some changes that can't be activated without a reboot, such as changing the kernel.

> Does it take time/have to download things?

Building has to download or build stuff that isn't in the cache. But contrary to, say, Docker it understands the build graph, so it only rebuilds actual dependees.

Activation depends on how many services you've changed, and how quickly they restart. Updating the bootloader is nearly instant.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#154

Post by kaba0 »

adkadskhj wrote: post #131
acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a new NixOS user currently set up with home manager and flakes - i'd probably switch in a heartbeat if someone gave me a nice nix-like package manager that also handled dotfiles. As much as i love the feeling of NixOS, i really want something like a Lockfile as seen in Rust (and other languages). Ie if i could define a `Cargo.toml`, which includes versions of packages or `*` if i don't care - and then it gets buil…

I don’t really understand your problem as in NixOS it is precisely the easiest to handle some packages from this repo and anothers from another. You can just add a single line of an alternative repo like altNixpkgs = “reference repo either by url or path” in the let in “block” and instead of pkgs.something just use altNixpkgs.pkgs.something.

Also, I usually manage my home packages separately from my global config. The easiest way to do that is probably by adding a different channel/path to your user’s nix-channels. I believe home-manager uses that. Alternatively you can also do the trick I mentioned in your home.nix file.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#155

Post by Gaelan »

alias_neo wrote: post #137
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…

Ive seen mention to "switching" to a configuration a few times now, what does that mean technically? Is it a reboot and select a different grub option, does it take time/have to download things? What really is "switching"?

Each NixOS machine has a current configuration, symlinked from /run/current-system. For example, my NixOS laptop currently has this:

    /run/current-system -> /nix/store/95n5xr5n8bw6xbab8fiz6cqc6mydryg8-nixos-system-Sweetpea-21.11pre291991.ea7d4aa9b82
My $PATH contains /run/current-system/sw/bin, so all of my machine's (globally-installed) software comes from whatever the current configuration is. There's also some other stuff in there, like /run/current-system/kernel and /run/current-system/etc, which contain what you'd expect.

Let's say I want to change something. I edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix, then run "nixos-rebuild build", which produces this:

    /nix/store/0fhxjqbv20psbkjvw70wni9ww2cxfqgm-nixos-system-Sweetpea-21.11pre292748.6933d068c5d
That step does all of the downloading, etc, but it doesn't actually change anything on my system—the /run/current-system symlink hasn't changed, so I'm still running on the old configuration.

When I'm ready to change, I run "/nix/store/0fhxj.../bin/switch-to-configuration". This step actually changes the /run/current-system symlink, updates /etc, restarts any daemons that were updated, etc. Obviously, if your configuration has a new kernel, that won't be applied until you reboot.

In practice, we almost always just run "nixos-rebuild switch", which does the build and switch in one go.

This whole process is entirely idempotent and reversible; I can switch back to any configuration I've ever built (unless I've since removed them to save space, of course). GRUB also displays a list of every configuration you've ever built, so you can always boot into a stable configuration even if you've somehow made a royal mess of things.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#156

Post by pxc »

Jiocus wrote: post #30
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?

If you don't mind the storage penalty, it looks pretty convenient to set up an Arch Linux chroot and use packages from the AUR when you need to: https://github.com/lemniskett/archbox/blob/master/NIXOS_INST...

Nixpkgs itself is several times the size of the base Arch Linux package collection, and by ‘non-unique’ package count, Nixpkgs is also much larger than the AUR. In addition to Nixpkgs, you can find Nix packages in several community ‘overlays’ for Nixpkgs as well as Nix's own user repositories.

You can check to see whether everything you currently use/need is conveniently available for NixOS in a comprehensive-ish way through the combination of these two web search tools:

• for Nixpkgs/NixOS: https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=21.05

• for NUR: https://nur.nix-community.org/

NixOS also includes native Flatpak support.

Fwiw, packaging most things for Nix is very easy. I left Arch in ~2010 because at the time the package management stack and default repos on Arch basically sucked compared to most distros I'd used and liked, and from then on I decided that if I wanted software that wasn't in my distro's repos I'd just package it myself. After taking a little time to learn the tools on whatever distro I was using, I never missed Arch or the AUR. Compared to other distros, packaging normal software from source is usually exceptionally easy on NixOS.

If I were you I'd just dive right in and hit Nix's channel on Matrix with the Nixpkgs manual in hand if I found something I wanted to use that wasn't already packaged. But you can fall back on the options outlined above.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#157

Post by kaba0 »

hollerith wrote: post #146
dnr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong. The google-chrome packages in nixpkgs are "built" by downloading the official releases (in .deb format I think) and massaging them a little. It takes a few seconds. When the zero-days came out, I just updated the upstream-info.json file in my local nixpkgs checkout (look at previous chrome version bump commits for how to do it) and rebuilt my system. I didn't have to wait for any PRs or merges or CI/hyd…

For anyone reading along, if you visit https://www.google.com/chrome/ from a Linux box, then click the big blue "Download" button, you are offered the choice of a .deb or an .rpm. I take it that that is what parent means by "the official releases". >massaging them a little. It takes a few seconds. Interesting and surprising. When I run ldd on my Chrome binary (which comes straight from Google, not my distro), it list…

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

I believe this is the package you are talking about. The significant part is basically bash, so it should be readable without nix knowledge as well. And yeah it basically creates both a wrapper for setting some env variables, but it also replaces some dynamic lib locations with patchelf. So apparently it does startup with a different checksum/validation happens at another level.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#158

Post by gdown »

pimeys wrote: post #83
jpe90 wrote: post #64

What do experienced nix-ers tend to do when they need to use software that's not up to date or available in nixpkgs? Are you guys knowledgeable enough to package everything yourselves, or do you just use buildFHSUserEnv until someone else works out the kinks? I didn't get a chance to figure out how to do the latter, but I'm curious because I've struggled as a new user.

I fork the repo, update the package in my fork, add the fork as a flake to my inputs and test my changes. When I'm happy, I create a pull request to the main repo. I started using NixOS in all my machines last winter, and slowly decided it is for me when I understood the basics. It was a rough start for me, but I have a few decades of linux knowledge, that helped me past the starting point. You can read my config and…

As a side note, thank you for posting this. I've been trying to get flakes set up on my system and this is more readable than the other dotfiles I've looked through.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#159

Post by dnr »

hollerith wrote: post #146
dnr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong. The google-chrome packages in nixpkgs are "built" by downloading the official releases (in .deb format I think) and massaging them a little. It takes a few seconds. When the zero-days came out, I just updated the upstream-info.json file in my local nixpkgs checkout (look at previous chrome version bump commits for how to do it) and rebuilt my system. I didn't have to wait for any PRs or merges or CI/hyd…

For anyone reading along, if you visit https://www.google.com/chrome/ from a Linux box, then click the big blue "Download" button, you are offered the choice of a .deb or an .rpm. I take it that that is what parent means by "the official releases". >massaging them a little. It takes a few seconds. Interesting and surprising. When I run ldd on my Chrome binary (which comes straight from Google, not my distro), it list…

Yes, exactly: https://github.com/NixOS/patchelf

It's a key part of how nix works.

Re: NixOS 21.05

#160

Post by casept »

adkadskhj wrote: post #131
acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a new NixOS user currently set up with home manager and flakes - i'd probably switch in a heartbeat if someone gave me a nice nix-like package manager that also handled dotfiles. As much as i love the feeling of NixOS, i really want something like a Lockfile as seen in Rust (and other languages). Ie if i could define a `Cargo.toml`, which includes versions of packages or `*` if i don't care - and then it gets buil…

Given that you already have flakeified everything, it's not that hard to pull in a different version of nixpkgs and cherry-pick packages from it. I have a (somewhat complex) setup utilizing this: https://github.com/casept/nixos-config
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