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

#121

Post by ris » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #69

xyzzyz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> « docker build » already exists and can already be made deterministic

Truly deterministic Dockerfiles are a rare thing to find among the ecosystem.

And we haven't even got into docker's poor support for unprivileged container building which leads to weird solutions using dind when you need to build an image from inside a container..

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

#122

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #7

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Looking at the GUI, I have no idea what it does. 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 can see the value of it, if I ever learn Nix, and want a quick way to make modifications without having to google every possibilities.

It literally says what each field does.. Just because it doesn't have an obvious minimal modern UI doesn't mean it doesn't do its job. Gotta read I guess .. but then again Nix also in general has a prerequisite of "calm down and read." But then again, so does Linux! The only thing you need to do to be Nix-competent is not flip the table and blame the tool when you get an error you don't understand. (Same goes for Has…

You can be "grumpy you had to read" or "grumpy about other being complaining they have to read". You chose that latter and I think it's a good choice :).

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

#123

Post by easygenes » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #118

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 Nixpkg…

Yes, the wiki takes the opposite approach. See: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_Wiki:About

  “The NixOS Wiki is a community-run project to document the Nix Ecosystem. NixOS is a Linux distribution which is created with the Nix package manager as its foundation. NixOS relies upon the extensive Nixpkgs package repository, which is one of the largest and most up-to-date package sources in the Linux world. The Nix ecosystem also includes tools like Hydra, for continuous integration testing, and NixOps, for deploying NixOS machines to networks and clouds (e.g. EC2, GCE, and Azure).”

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

#124

Post by KronisLV » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #111

KronisLV wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off.

I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector.

Though maybe the industry here is lagging behind trends - only in the past 3 years or so Docker has started gaining a foothold and even large corporations are just figuring out how to run their own Kubernetes clusters and Docker Swarm is still in use in some places, or even just Docker Compose.

Then again, some of these projects don't even have systemd services in place to ensure that they can be controlled easily, so who knows... Manually launching Tomcat or GlassFish instances never inspires confidence.

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

#125

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

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've used it as my daily driver for the last 7 years.

I don't really play games that much but you can install Steam, and at that point the distro doesn't matter as much. (Though for a bunch of reasons I think NixOS would be the ideal distro to base SteamOS off of, and Valve & co. are only now closing the gap years later with some still-beta flatpak-esque stuff.)

I would say, if you can get excited with messing around with Nix instead of playing video games, you're going to have a better time. Not because you need to (though you might if this is your first time doing Linux), but because the joy lies in being able to understand "what the fuck is actually going on!" for the first time, and getting to that level of understanding will take some time.

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

#126

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

exdsq wrote: post #68

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.

This is the type of costs-and-benefits "it's not for me" I can get behind.

(I left another comment about as a Nix user I don't mind it not being popular, but I do mind people complaining about the costs and ignoring whatever benefits might lie on the other side, as if all technology is reducible to its learning curves.)

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

#127

Post by trenchgun » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

amarant wrote: post #102

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…

There is some somewhat confusing naming here, and I believe it is the cause of your confusion. There is a operating system named Nixos. It uses a package manager called Nix. The package manager can be installed in other operating systems. The package manager is configured using a functional language also called Nix. What you installed was either the package manager, or a interpreter for the language. They could've na…

I don't think it is confusing. There is a package manager Nix, and a distro built around it, NixOS. And the package repository Nixpkgs.

What is confusing however, is that the configuration language and the package manager have the same name, Nix.

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

#128

Post by easygenes » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:08 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.

Yes, I agree it needs to be fixed. I noted this source of confusion earlier and appreciate the confirmation. Will be working on getting a disambiguation header on the main download page soon.

You’re on the right track. Nix is a package manager you can use on just about any Linux distribution, and also MacOS. NixOS is a Linux distro built with and including Nix (and using Nixpkgs as its package repo).

Nix is also the name of the functional programming language created to describe packages in Nix the package manager.

Nix is also a pun on the word meaning “nothing”, which is a nod to how it’s all purely functional.

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

#129

Post by trenchgun » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

Exellent! I was thinking of maybe doing this at some point. Happy that somebody else is alrady doing it. I might contribute to it.

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

#130

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

astral303 wrote: post #44

To call this an interface for “ non-technical” users is an utter delusion.

It should be said it is for technical but non-programmer users, "power users".

I don't think it is more scary than dconf-editor or regedit :D.

After this foundation is laid, there's no reason we can't add more "tutorial/wizard" flows, just as Microsoft kept revamping the Windows "control panel" but kept the old version.

What we can't do is simply drop config options like Apple. The Nix ecosystem aspires to be all mechanism minimal policy. If upstream exposes the knob, we ought to somehow expose it, at least via a free-form textual "extraConfig".