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Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

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Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#31

Post by forgotpwd16 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #14
dmitriid wrote: post #2

This will sound rude, but I'm more and more convinced that people immersed in nix have never seen a real person in real life. defined boolean expression reference true. wat. I'm a technical person, and I have no idea what this is. And for technical people? Literally everyone says that "nix is really hard to get started with". nix and nix-related developers, please, please find some real people and talk to them.

You probably don't have a problem that this solves. I.e., some people still download random zipfiles from the internet and install each individual app from a wizard dialog onto their Windows 10 machine. They find software repositories and package managers confusing and overengineered. I guess that's okay.

>They find software repositories and package managers confusing and overengineered.

And that's why big distros have created GUIs (e.g. Ubuntu's software center) that truly hide any technicalities. Nix-GUI, as it's now, will instead be more like Synaptic, it kinda makes life easier but you still require technical knowledge to use it.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#33

Post by throwaway894345 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

I haven’t used full-on NixOS yet, but I’ve used the Nix package manager quite a lot, and literally all of my forays have been miserable for a variety of different reasons.

To be clear, I love what Nix aspires to be, but it doesn’t deliver on its promises IMO.

As a package author, the Nix language has lots of rough edges, it’s absurdly tedious to figure out how to call various functions (what type of argument does it expect?) because it’s untyped and nixpkgs is poorly documented. There are too many other issues here to unpack.

As a consumer of packages, it’s often unclear what I need to do to install anything but the simplest packages. E.g., installing vs code with some plugins (note that this differs between NixOS and other systems). Further, the CLI interfaces are confusing from a UX perspective IMO, and it’s often unclear what I actually need to use Nix well (homemanager? flakes?) the guidance is confusing and contradictory.

So I don’t hate Nix, but I do have a lot of constructive criticism.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#34

Post by Narice »

georgyo wrote: post #27
dmitriid wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autogenerated documentation !== up-to-date and/or good documentation. Autogenerated means "we take these particular strings and texts and dump them in a different format". It says nothing about whether they are even remotely up to date.

Sure, but in my experience the documentation from the source has always been correct. There is tons of stuff on other websites that is outdated, but the source documentation has not suffered the same atrophy. More importantly, much of the documentation is auto generated not from arbitrary doc strings, but from the nix expressions themselves. IE: https://search.nixos.org/options ? So I believe there was another source…

Most probably NixOS Wiki, it's not official but always comes up as the top result because the manual's titles are irrelevent when you're trying to solve a specific issue. The NixOS Wiki is very helpful in a lot of ways (there is more info than in the manuals and you don't have to troubleshoot for hours because you missed activating some options), butit is true that it is sometimes outdated :/

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#35

Post by EE84M3i »

georgyo wrote: post #27
dmitriid wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autogenerated documentation !== up-to-date and/or good documentation. Autogenerated means "we take these particular strings and texts and dump them in a different format". It says nothing about whether they are even remotely up to date.

Sure, but in my experience the documentation from the source has always been correct. There is tons of stuff on other websites that is outdated, but the source documentation has not suffered the same atrophy. More importantly, much of the documentation is auto generated not from arbitrary doc strings, but from the nix expressions themselves. IE: https://search.nixos.org/options ? So I believe there was another source…

One example: nix-pills introduces nix-env -i[1] as the third "pill" -- isn't this basically deprecated and never recommended by serious uesrs?

[1]: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/enter-environment.html

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#36

Post by depressedpanda »

lillecarl wrote: post #18
TeMPOraL wrote: post #9

What a coincidence. I was just asking about NixOS on Mastodon. Reposting (I'm on a mobile, little time to type): " a question on dev environment isolation. Is either #NixOS or #GUIX usable as an OS for day-to-day use (coding, browsing, occasional gaming)? Or is it better to just use their respective package managers on top of regular Linux? Also, anyone here doing desktop #virtualization? Is there a sense of running…

I have a Windows VM on a NixOS host for gaming, was really quite convenient to set it up, I set it up on a separate drive to be able to boot native too but I ended up never really doing it, so I will reconfigure my 2 drives as a Zraid and have windows on a Zvol instead. NVIDIA works great, but if I were to buy new hardware I'd go AMD (maybe Intel when the time comes)

> I have a Windows VM on a NixOS host for gaming, was really quite convenient to set it up, I set it up on a separate drive to be able to boot native too

I've been planning on doing exactly this, but haven't had the time to figure out the best way of going about it.

Is there a good guide/write up you'd recommend? (I already have a Windows 10 install on a separate SSD, but I rarely boot it because I can't stand the OS)

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#37

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

GordonS wrote: post #32

I've never used Nix, but it sounds interesting. I get the impression it's more used on desktop, but I'm curious if anyone has used it on servers?

Yes. I know Shopify does (or at least did), I believe Target was a relatively early adopter. I think Tailscale dabbled with the idea.

Everything feels quite stable from a server admin perspective, though there are still various competing methods to actually administer fleets of machines. Nix Ops is a bit opinionated but works okay. I just build locally or in CI and push to hosts remotely.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#38

Post by forgotpwd16 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #33
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

I haven’t used full-on NixOS yet, but I’ve used the Nix package manager quite a lot, and literally all of my forays have been miserable for a variety of different reasons. To be clear, I love what Nix aspires to be, but it doesn’t deliver on its promises IMO. As a package author, the Nix language has lots of rough edges, it’s absurdly tedious to figure out how to call various functions (what type of argument does it…

>So I don’t hate Nix, but I do have a lot of constructive criticism.

Why not write a blog post? Probably some of those issues are known but no one works on them, so a reminder isn't bad. And for those that aren't, maybe someone picks it up and tries to fix it.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#39

Post by fesc »

GordonS wrote: post #32

I've never used Nix, but it sounds interesting. I get the impression it's more used on desktop, but I'm curious if anyone has used it on servers?

I'm using it for some internal systems at work and I feel there's nothing like it.

NixOS gives a level of reproducability that other tools like Ansible won't ever be able to give you.

This reproducability means it makes debugging problems very easy: E.g. uncomment a line in the config and see if something starts working again. You can nearly undo everything cleanly in NixOS by just doing that.

On the other hand the learning curve really is pretty steep. Took me about half a year to get to a point where I understood it enough to be able to debug most errors.

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