Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 206 posts

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

#61

Post by xyzzyz »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #58
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 have no opinion about NixOS but every time I read someone touting its merits I feel like I live in a parallel universe. NixOS seems to solve problems I never had at extreme costs to its general usability. I don’t care that I can rebuilt a computer identical to mine in minutes. I don’t change computer often enough for it to matter and the tweaking I do is minimal because frankly tweaking configuration is not fun and…

> I guess it could make sense for servers as an alternative to provisioning tools but then it seems to me like it’s competing with docker and kubernetes

It’s not competing, it’s complementing. Think of it as a fully deterministic “docker build”.

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

#62

Post by Zababa »

kaba0 wrote: post #57
Zababa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm guessing that you actually need to know Nix to be able to use it, which kinda defeats the "usable for non-technical users" goal. I don't think that's true. Excel is usable by non-technical users. Part of it is due to the GUI, part of it is due to the easy packaging. But you still need to know spreadsheets to use it. This project does the same for Nix.

Is it? There would not be several courses on it otherwise.

There's a difference between "usable" and "having a deep knowledge" I think.

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

#63

Post by easygenes »

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…

The UI for Nix has been under significant rework over the last ~3 years, but the new UI isn't ready for primetime yet, so none of it is made prominent now. It's getting there though.

You can have a peek here: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/experiment...

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

#64

Post by easygenes »

tinco wrote: post #47
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…

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

Yeah, I'm just waiting for Jeff Geerling to get onboard with Nix. Then things will get interesting (he's a big Ansible buff and probably the biggest RasPi Youtuber).

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

#65

Post by easygenes »

m45t3r wrote: post #59
tinco wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

> Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. I don't think it is fair to say that Nix as a programming language is horrible, IMO, as a DSL it is pretty good and fits the domain well. It is a strange language at first and it…

rnix-lsp is decent these days: https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-lsp

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

#66

Post by dgb23 »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #58
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 have no opinion about NixOS but every time I read someone touting its merits I feel like I live in a parallel universe. NixOS seems to solve problems I never had at extreme costs to its general usability. I don’t care that I can rebuilt a computer identical to mine in minutes. I don’t change computer often enough for it to matter and the tweaking I do is minimal because frankly tweaking configuration is not fun and…

Two examples to get a taste of the tradeoffs and utility it provides would be postgrest and IHL.

I think it’s sexy. But like you I haven’t had the time to really dive into it and understand it. The promise is simplification, both operational and in terms of the runtime.

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

#67

Post by capableweb »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #58
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 have no opinion about NixOS but every time I read someone touting its merits I feel like I live in a parallel universe. NixOS seems to solve problems I never had at extreme costs to its general usability. I don’t care that I can rebuilt a computer identical to mine in minutes. I don’t change computer often enough for it to matter and the tweaking I do is minimal because frankly tweaking configuration is not fun and…

> it seems to me like it’s competing with docker and kubernetes and I have never seen a convincing argument about why it would be better.

This seems to indicate a huge mismatch between what you think Nix/OS is compared to what it actually is. NixOS is for creating/maintaining systems, Docker is for running applications and Kubernetes is for running applications but across multiple servers, neither of those tools are like the other really.

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

#68

Post by exdsq »

Having worked in a large Nix dev environment, the difficulty in understanding what was going on meant devops were needed for the simplest changes. Ended up being a blocker for every project I was on. Love the idea but really really dislike it in practice. NixOS is cool though.

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

#69

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #61
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no opinion about NixOS but every time I read someone touting its merits I feel like I live in a parallel universe. NixOS seems to solve problems I never had at extreme costs to its general usability. I don’t care that I can rebuilt a computer identical to mine in minutes. I don’t change computer often enough for it to matter and the tweaking I do is minimal because frankly tweaking configuration is not fun and…

> I guess it could make sense for servers as an alternative to provisioning tools but then it seems to me like it’s competing with docker and kubernetes It’s not competing, it’s complementing. Think of it as a fully deterministic “docker build”.

Yes but « docker build » already exists and can already be made deterministic so it’s indeed somewhat competing. Would anything be easier by using Nix?

Right now it seems to me like a large ordeal with little to no benefits and my interaction with the Nix community hasn’t been very convincing. A lot of Nix users seem to believe determinism and reproducibility of everything to be enough of a justification in itself. I don’t think it’s worth the pain.

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

#70

Post by ElonMuskrat »

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?

Yeah. We've used it on servers. It's good in a small setting where a handful of Nix experts can run the infrastructure show.

Getting it to scale to an organisation of hundreds wasn't feasible. As soon as we needed to start expanding "infrastructure" beyond just one team, and rapidly hiring new engineers in the context of rapid growth. Training and learning curve was intractable. And we cannot just easily hire NixOS experts like traditional Ubuntu OS.

Nix made complicated things possible but simple things complicated. Pretty much every new feature request could only be processed by a handful of Nix experts, and it was obvious that wouldn't scale with the growth of the company.

Frankly, Nix solves problems that the industry has already solved or knows how to live. Its lack of adoption from software vendors makes the economical cost/benefit unatractive.

Post reply on HN