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NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

rousette.org.uk

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Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#41

Post by spindle »

anandsuresh wrote: post #8

Love to see more adoption of Nix and NixOS. I started my Nix journey a little over a year ago, and I regret not having switched sooner. A package-manager that also ships an operating system that can be customized from the bootloader up, using a purely functional programming language is the perfect configuration management tool! It does have some rough edges, and I did lose some hair figuring things out early on, but…

I always think it's worth mentioning explicitly that NixOS makes it not just possible to put everything including the root file system on ZFS, it makes it completely easy.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#42

Post by zeec123 »

tracnar wrote: post #24
unsungNovelty wrote: post #22

I literally just gave NixOS a go day before yesterday. The two things I noticed if you want to use NixOS as just a basic desktop setup was.. 1. It is simple and fast to install. People make NixOS feels like black magic. NixOS is easier to install than Arch linux. Just do 3 things. Partition your disk, create the nix configuration file and finally run the command "nixos-install" command. Let me explain with a lil more…

You can use the unstable branch for rolling releases closer to how arch works.

With flakes I am using the master branch. You cannot get more bleeding edge and there is absolutely no danger. If something does break, I just boot the previous system. So awesome!

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#43

Post by dagw »

Tomte wrote: post #39

After hearing "NixOS has many, many packages, you won't be missing much" for a long time and seeing the package search prompt on the NixOS front page, I decided to try it What are obscure programs few people need or use? Thinking back about my studies in computational linguistics, Praat and Wavesurfer popped into my mind. Both available. Wow. That's seriously impressive.

My goto test package for this is OpenFoam. Unfortunately they didn't have it.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#45

Post by capableweb »

ostenning wrote: post #44

How does KDE play with Nix? I recall KDE shits all over the place with all the different cfg files it has. I had trouble trying to store them in my git repo. Would be awesome to use Nix to bring some sanity to KDE config

I have two experiences with trying KDE, one time with Arch and one time with NixOS. Both times I ended up (trying to) get rid of it again. The Arch experience left me with bunch of trash files and software still installed, my dbus setup is still not the same since then. But with NixOS I simply rolled back to the previous build and everything was fine.

The environment itself worked fine on both OSes, but if you're not sure if you'll like it, trying it on NixOS is way safer than anything else.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#46

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

anandsuresh wrote: post #8

Love to see more adoption of Nix and NixOS. I started my Nix journey a little over a year ago, and I regret not having switched sooner. A package-manager that also ships an operating system that can be customized from the bootloader up, using a purely functional programming language is the perfect configuration management tool! It does have some rough edges, and I did lose some hair figuring things out early on, but…

> Love to see more adoption of Nix and NixOS.

I don't want a 'journey' to use my OS. I don't want to learn a whole new language and set of overengineered abstractions to solve what I see as, at most, 5% more of application installation problems that are already 75% solved by package managers[0]. If the Nix community wants more people using Nix, they'll have to make it more attractive for those of us who do not want to waste so much time needlessly learning new stuff to do the same things we're already doing.

[0] which are already an overengineered and under-delivering solution in my opinion.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#47

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #22

I literally just gave NixOS a go day before yesterday. The two things I noticed if you want to use NixOS as just a basic desktop setup was.. 1. It is simple and fast to install. People make NixOS feels like black magic. NixOS is easier to install than Arch linux. Just do 3 things. Partition your disk, create the nix configuration file and finally run the command "nixos-install" command. Let me explain with a lil more…

> It is simple and fast to install. People make NixOS feels like black magic. NixOS is easier to install than Arch linux. Just do 3 things. Partition your disk, create the nix configuration file and finally run the command "nixos-install" command.

Step 2 is doing a lot of work here. It's pretty 'draw the rest of the fucking owl'.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#48

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Firehawke wrote: post #3
Stampo00 wrote: post #2

I want to use NixOS so bad Or what Arch has become. But I want to believe

Whereas I just left Debian-based distros because I'm hitting that exact problem with backported patches not arriving in any reasonable length of time in many packages. There seems to be a real manpower problem over at Debian in terms of maintainers.

The real problem is an application distribution paradigm that relies on unpaid third party maintainers just to get up to date software.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#49

Post by sjustinas »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #46
anandsuresh wrote: post #8

Love to see more adoption of Nix and NixOS. I started my Nix journey a little over a year ago, and I regret not having switched sooner. A package-manager that also ships an operating system that can be customized from the bootloader up, using a purely functional programming language is the perfect configuration management tool! It does have some rough edges, and I did lose some hair figuring things out early on, but…

> Love to see more adoption of Nix and NixOS. I don't want a 'journey' to use my OS. I don't want to learn a whole new language and set of overengineered abstractions to solve what I see as, at most, 5% more of application installation problems that are already 75% solved by package managers[0]. If the Nix community wants more people using Nix, they'll have to make it more attractive for those of us who do not want t…

That's absolutely fair, I don't think either the parent or the NixOS devs implied in any way that it should be the right fit for everyone or 100% of the Linux distro market share is the end goal.

For me, the benefits outweigh the quirks of the language. As my alternatives to manage multiple machines consist of: wonky Bash scripts, similar tooling but bolted-on on top of the distro and with no built-in rollbacks (Ansible, Puppet, etc.), or trying to get everything right manually, Nix does not seem like the worst out of this bunch.

Re: NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

#50

Post by altgans »

anandsuresh wrote: post #8

Love to see more adoption of Nix and NixOS. I started my Nix journey a little over a year ago, and I regret not having switched sooner. A package-manager that also ships an operating system that can be customized from the bootloader up, using a purely functional programming language is the perfect configuration management tool! It does have some rough edges, and I did lose some hair figuring things out early on, but…

I switched to NixOS half a year ago. The reason? I fell in love with literate programming (I use [1]); being able to write (and read) your whole OS configuration is the dream!

There are few bad sides to NixOS though.

The community consists mostly of programmers, which means I am missing some creative tools (mockups, mindmaps, ..). In the future I will be able to provide/build them myself, but it is not a smooth transition from my previous arch setup.

Also the whole documentation sucks: There are three (!) official manuals + the home-manager manual + Nix pills + YT + random blogs where I have to piece everything together.

Still I find NixOS superior to every other OS (windows, linux) I have tried so far. I just feel free and am not afraid to fuck up anything [2], as I can just go to a previous generation when it doesn't boot.

Lastly, I can save my whole config in git and am free to try new tools -- If I don't like them, I just remove their line in my config. No more chasing after random install folders! (Except in home..)

[1]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt [2]: All the "hacker" stuff: kernel modules, network hardening, ...

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