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NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)

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

#61

Post by rgoulter »

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…

> 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 [do development work]

This is pragmatic.

Nix somewhat reminds me of the kinds of mindsets that enjoy learning Vim/Emacs, or learning how to use 40%-sized keyboards like the Planck. -- I think it takes curiosity to be interested in that kindof stuff.

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

#62

Post by muth02446 »

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…

This super interesting to me as I am currently PXE booting Ubuntu which is a pain every two years when I switch the new LTS release. Do you have some pointers or configs to your setup?

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

#63

Post by GekkePrutser »

spindle wrote: post #41
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.

It's not unique at that though. FreeBSD has had this for a decade. And Ubuntu is adding it now as an installer option.

PS: I do like the idea of NixOS and its USPs which are indeed unique :)

For me what's stopping me is the learning curve. I don't mind learning per se but if I put the time in it I'd like it to be for something that's useful in more places. Like ansible.

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

#64

Post by yissp »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #38
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…

#MeToo. I am using two OSX machines and two remote Linux machines for my day-2-day private/work related stuff. Nix+home-manager allows me to have all productivity tools consistently available across all platforms with minimal effort [1]. Dotfiles/shell config lives in a separate folder [2] and is not managed in nix. Tangent: Secrets are are encrypted with git-crypt ( https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt ) and live in th…

> #MeToo

maybe best to avoid that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement

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

#65

Post by k__ »

altgans wrote: post #59
k__ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. I just played around with R the other day and it would use MD too to generate HTML/PDF. It uses Knitr. https://kbroman.org/knitr_knutshell/pages/Rmarkdown.html

That sounds like a nice way to do it, too. I heard about it before, but don't know R, so I didn't really consider it. The reason I chose lmt is that it correctly keeps the markdown language syntax of the code blocks. That means I can put my literate config into my Zettelkasten [1] or [2] and watch it pretty-print in the browser. There are also literate [3] and org-babel [4], but I don't think they are future proof. .…

Do these things work with any programming language? Like, do they still allow for "squiggly lines" (linter/static typing) in the editor?

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

#66

Post by notimrelakatos »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #26
DenseComet wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a daily driver, I'd just use nixos-unstable instead of a specific release to get access to all the up to date packages. It's actually not as unstable as the name might imply. PRs are merged into the master branch of nixpkgs and are only merged into the unstable branch once the updated package is successfully built so it tends to be perfectly OK for daily use. A lot of updates do get backported to stable branches…

I do not like backported packages. So is unstable directly upstream stable version of packages exactly like Arch? Cos that is what I want. Cos in Linux distro context, debian or nixos unstable repo just means it is not yet tested for the specific distro. But in fact the packages itself would be latest stable versions from upstreams.

Unstable (most often than not) is almost an exact copy of the latest branch, which means it has most of it's packages updated to latest version. Given the nature and abstractions of NixOS, unstable ends up being way more stable than most distros, you also get rollbacks for free.

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

#67

Post by unsungNovelty »

notimrelakatos wrote: post #66
unsungNovelty wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not like backported packages. So is unstable directly upstream stable version of packages exactly like Arch? Cos that is what I want. Cos in Linux distro context, debian or nixos unstable repo just means it is not yet tested for the specific distro. But in fact the packages itself would be latest stable versions from upstreams.

Unstable (most often than not) is almost an exact copy of the latest branch, which means it has most of it's packages updated to latest version. Given the nature and abstractions of NixOS, unstable ends up being way more stable than most distros, you also get rollbacks for free.

But unstable repo is always a second tier citizen in most distros. This means less eyes on them. This is where Arch excels. Arch just provides packages "as is" or how it was intended by the upstream and the packages are first class citizens. So they get as much as attention as it is gonna get.

The usage of "unstable" itself is from an era where even stable versions broke a lot. This is not the case anymore. And stable repos breaking more than unstable repos in some distros atleast proves it.

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

#68

Post by amelius »

altgans wrote: post #50
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 trans…

> I just feel free and am not afraid to fuck up anything

Until you have to install the latest NVidia drivers, I suppose.

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

#69

Post by skerit »

altgans wrote: post #50
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 trans…

I really like the idea of NixOS, but there not being a single clear guide of how to set everything up (and the messy documentation) is the biggest thing holding me back. I also really don't like wasting so much time on tinkering with my system the way I used to do.

But I'm seeing so much Nix news these past few weeks, I guess it'll be better in a few years!

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

#70

Post by georgyo »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #67
notimrelakatos wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstable (most often than not) is almost an exact copy of the latest branch, which means it has most of it's packages updated to latest version. Given the nature and abstractions of NixOS, unstable ends up being way more stable than most distros, you also get rollbacks for free.

But unstable repo is always a second tier citizen in most distros. This means less eyes on them. This is where Arch excels. Arch just provides packages "as is" or how it was intended by the upstream and the packages are first class citizens. So they get as much as attention as it is gonna get. The usage of "unstable" itself is from an era where even stable versions broke a lot. This is not the case anymore. And stabl…

Unstable in NixOS is nothing like the horrors that wait in Fedora Rawhide and Debian Sid.

NixOS benefits from the fact that it has unit tests and that all packages are built in a consistent way across all packages.

Archlinux is a bit more stable then NixOS unstable, but not significantly so. But more importantly if you do somehow manage to update to a broken build, it's take less than a second to roll back to exactly where you were before hand.

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