Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #76

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…

> A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. I don't have any doubts about the likes of Nix or even other attempts at improving the reproducibility of building and installing packages being technically superior to what we have now in some ways. But at the same time, you can't forget about people and in some ways the industry taking the path of least resistance whenever possible. You want to introduce…

Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. If you like every 6 months (or merely every job change!) fuck with APT, your bashrc, etc. with a little stack overflowing during onboarding, whatever. It's too rare to be worth optimizing; I get it. If you switch projects every 2 weeks, the calculus changes greatly.

I do work at one of them now, but I got into Nix as a student hobbyist, when I was also rotating through homework assignments and personal projects quickly.

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

#112

Post by easygenes » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

openfuture wrote: post #108

throwaway894345 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's always guix... Using scheme for everything is great, for showcase and recent developments check this video on guix home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5cdtSfTpE0

Just note Guix is a GNU project so there’s no support at all for anything unfree.

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

#113

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

totony wrote: post #88

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 went pretty deep in nix recently and imo the "Fixing other people's garbage is the bane of any package system maintainer, it's no different here" + high learning curve + lack of xattrs and permissions support in nix store makes it a bad OS. The amount of custom code to fix "issues" and "issues" that are only fixed because the maintainer thinks he knows better than the dev is too big to be maintainable. Still a…

> Fixing other people's garbage is the bane of any package system maintainer, it's no different here.

I honestly think it's hard for "Nix to Nix" simply because by trying to make everything reproducible, it is dealing with more of upstream's garbage, and "reifying" the hoops that people jump through doing sysadmin things in code looks scary.

I really want more upstream developers to use Nix, so they might loose their myopia, and start thinking of the the FOSS ecosystem as a whole, and not just their own packages within it. Nix is the best way to get the bird's eye view, I am sure. Just try not to gag at what you see!

[1] Though I still maintain that contributing to Nixpkgs is much easier than contributing to e.g. Debian or Fedora.

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

#114

Post by Nullabillity » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

zzzeek wrote: post #105

Nullabillity wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit confusing (and the old site did a better job explaining this), but basically, you have two separate projects: Nix (a package manager/build system) and NixOS (a standalone Linux distribution that uses the Nix package manager).

can i use the nix package manager without using nixos? is that what the "install" link I referred towards is setting up ? my original impression of nix years ago was that oh it's a package manager, maybe like the old BSD packagesource thing, great. but then "NixOS" came in and seemed to confuse things. all good stuff but wow that website needs to be reorganized.

> can i use the nix package manager without using nixos? is that what the "install" link I referred towards is setting up ? my original impression of nix years ago was that oh it's a package manager, maybe like the old BSD packagesource thing, great. but then "NixOS" came in and seemed to confuse things.

Yes. On the download page[0] you have two sections: Nix (the one you were looking at), and NixOS (which is packaged as a traditional disk image).

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

#115

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

deltasixeight wrote: post #98

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…

> A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. I hate this expression. I'm a nix user. But if you can't understand why people dislike it... you're the one that's odd and out of touch. If you want people to adopt nix the worst way to convince them is to call their behavior odd when it isn't. The reason why adoption of nix is so low is trivial. High initial learning curve and it's so different from every…

What we dislike is everything talking about the costs, and not the benefits. Fine if it's not for you --- I personally care more about institution and upstream adoption than getting more random end users at this point --- but people passing off these one-sided cost-and-no-consideration-of-benefits analyses as engineering decisions is a bit grating.

To me Nix is hard, but Nix is worth it. I acknowledge these people's pain, now would they acknowledge my pleasure (ideally without writing it off as that of a cult inductee! :)).

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

#116

Post by exitheone » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #86

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…

The fact that instead of upgrading, you had to wipe and restart doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for NixOS.

I think the important thing that did not come across very well is that "wipe and reinstall" with nix is so incredibly painless that doing it is even an option. The same would be very very painful with other distributions. A clean reinstall of your whole system with nixos takes maybe 30 minutes. Compare with the average "my Ubuntu upgrade failed" debugging session...

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

#117

Post by whateveracct » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

seoaeu wrote: post #94

Zababa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the same, although their choice of "sliding buttons" with text and color inside is a bit weird compared to checkboxes.

What? They're nothing alike. One has normal, logical options like selecting sound effects and output devices. The other has useless things like how much the media keys adjust the volume by and whether to entirely disable sound on the system, and is littered with technical jargon like 'undefined' and 'boolean'.

You don't select your output device with your configuration.nix. You use it to configure the underlying OS. So doing this stuff with a GUI? Unheard of in the mainstream. Unnecessary maybe too, but still. Not the same.

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

#118

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

zzzeek wrote: post #97

I keep going to the NixOS website to understand what NixOS is. it says it's an "OS". I've been in the computer thing for a long time and in my experience, an "OS" is the thing that runs when your machine first boots up. From this it follows that you can't run an "OS" without rebooting a machine (or running it in a VM, or whatever). Yet I go to nixos.org, click "Learn" (let's assume I'm the supposed "non technical use…

The website has decided the best rhetorical approach is to describe what the "ecosystem does for you", and thus not talk that much about Nix vs NixOS vs Nixpkgs up front. But I think that might be mistake. I would lead with:

Nix - package manager / build systems for end-to-end reproducibility at scale.

Nixpkgs - Extremely comprehensive package repository built using Nix.

NixOS - Linux distribution built around Nixpkgs

Home-Manager - doftfile manager built around Nixpkgs

There are other tools, but they are much more niche, so I would start with that. I think that clears up with what you and many others have asked, and doesn't "distract from the sales pitch" too much.

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

#119

Post by bogwog » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #86

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…

The fact that instead of upgrading, you had to wipe and restart doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for NixOS.

I disagree. I don't use Nix, but I've been in situations before where an upgrade either couldn't complete, or catastrophically broke something. Those situations are horrible and can take hours or days to resolve.

Having the option to say "fuck it" and just reinstall everything, without worrying about manually installing exact software versions and reconfiguring everything sounds amazing.

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

#120

Post by easygenes » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #113

totony wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have went pretty deep in nix recently and imo the "Fixing other people's garbage is the bane of any package system maintainer, it's no different here" + high learning curve + lack of xattrs and permissions support in nix store makes it a bad OS. The amount of custom code to fix "issues" and "issues" that are only fixed because the maintainer thinks he knows better than the dev is too big to be maintainable. Still a…

> Fixing other people's garbage is the bane of any package system maintainer, it's no different here. I honestly think it's hard for "Nix to Nix" simply because by trying to make everything reproducible, it is dealing with more of upstream's garbage, and "reifying" the hoops that people jump through doing sysadmin things in code looks scary. I really want more upstream developers to use Nix, so they might loose their…

Yeah, exactly. Nixpkgs is basically the largest and most up to date repo in the Linux world now. Most of that’s coming just from the small existing core community. That has to say something for the efficiency of it.