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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)

#71

Post by zeec123 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #55
ris wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm hearing is "I really don't like the way traditional systems are designed and I don't want to have to learn anything new!" Nix is different, unapologetically so, that's the issue. And if it had to be more orthodox to win over a few more itinerant users that would make the whole thing pointless.

I'm not asking it to be more 'orthodox', I'm asking to not have to spend months scouring poor documentation to learn a new language and toolchain to gain the very few benefits Nix provides over the existing systems. If Nix is so inherently complicated it cannot deliver that, then why would I want it? Ultimately I want less complication in my life, not more, and Nix very much does not provide that from what I can see.

It is like saying I don’t want spending months to learn git to gain the very few benefits of a version control system. I much prefer to share my code with my coworkers via usb-sticks. Yeah this is less complicated in the short term.

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

#72

Post by Filligree »

amelius wrote: post #68
altgans wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that’s not any harder than anything else.

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

#73

Post by e3bc54b2 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #55
ris wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm hearing is "I really don't like the way traditional systems are designed and I don't want to have to learn anything new!" Nix is different, unapologetically so, that's the issue. And if it had to be more orthodox to win over a few more itinerant users that would make the whole thing pointless.

I'm not asking it to be more 'orthodox', I'm asking to not have to spend months scouring poor documentation to learn a new language and toolchain to gain the very few benefits Nix provides over the existing systems. If Nix is so inherently complicated it cannot deliver that, then why would I want it? Ultimately I want less complication in my life, not more, and Nix very much does not provide that from what I can see.

Traditional systems have complexity too. Its just not up front.

I like to compare it to fossil fuels and global warming. Traditional systems get one started quick, but eventually build a large fragile system that gets harder to fix/rebuild the longer it goes on.

Nix is different, it forces you to do your work upfront. But once setup, you pretty much can (and to my attestation do) forget it is in place. You do have to learn setting a anything a and everything. But you only do it once. If the house burns down, you don't need to remember what you had. You don't need to remember what to setup in what order. You don't have to find out you forgot something in the middle of something else. In other words, the onus is no longer on you.

That last sentence is incredibly liberating. I stopped worrying having black screens after updates and pretty much stopped having rescue disc, because rescue functionality comes built in the system. It sounds cultish, and it kinda is, but as I said in previous comment on Nix, it is the worst system management tool, except all the others.

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

#74

Post by kokada »

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 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.

This is fair, but keep in mind that package managing is only a small part that what Nix solves, and it is a much superior solution than anything else that I know (Docker for example is not really reproducible because you can't trace all dependencies; this seems like a philosophic issue but I saw some containers breaking because some dependency inside the container was updated without nobody knowing).

If we take NixOS, it also solves the issue with configuration, and with some auxiliary tools it also solves issues with deployment. You have alternatives for both of the issues too, but the fact that NixOS is much more integrated than any tooling (like Ansible, Puppet, etc) means you have much more flexibility. Also, don't forget atomic upgrades and fallback.

Eventually, instead of "wasting time", NixOS starts to save time by becoming the most reliable OS you ever used: you will never waste time anymore reinstalling your system from scratch, or if your hardware broke, you will never waste days trying to get your system to the same way it was. Also, because nixpkgs is enormous, you also tend to save time by not looking at "oh, this program seems cool, how can I install it on my computer since I never heard of this XYZ language?", and them installing the package manager from the language in 5 different ways because you have no clue. And even when you need to package the program yourself, nixpkgs has many abstractions that makes it much easier.

So instead of wasting time, Nix and NixOS is an investment. You may choose to invest your time right now to save later or not. Either way is fine.

Just to finish the topic, I fully concur yo you that we as a community needs to have better documentation.

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

#75

Post by HerrMonnezza »

b3n wrote: post #19

I recently made the switch to Guix, which is a distro heavily inspired by NixOS. It even has a Nix service[1] which is easily enabled to get the best of both worlds. Highly recommended! [1] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Miscellaneous-Servi...

How do Nix and Guix compare?

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

#77

Post by ashtonkem »

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…

There’s a small amount of homelab stuff I need to spend the time porting to nixos. Grafana is in there, for example, but pihole is not. I currently run a weird mix of VMs because of this, and I’d like to make that more homogenous.

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

#78

Post by soraminazuki »

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.

Nix's official package repository, Nixpkgs, is the most up-to-date repository out there[1]. Especially so for the unstable channel. So I assume it would fit your needs well.

But with Nix, you can be more flexible and mix packages from stable and unstable channels very easily. In my case, the kernel and desktop environment comes from the stable channel while the rest comes from unstable.

[1]: https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

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

#79

Post by anandsuresh »

bambambazooka wrote: post #20
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…

Is your config available? It sounds very interesting and complete. Especially the PXE boot from a pi sounds great!

Not in any usable form. But I do intend to blog about it once I clean it up. :)

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

#80

Post by anandsuresh »

muth02446 wrote: post #62
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?

Not in any usable form. But I do intend to blog about it once I clean it up.
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