41–50 of 201 posts
My experience with NixOS: Package installation is usually just from the official channel, system options can usually be done with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` and home-manager. Major problems: installing niche proprietary software that you may have to package yourself, and fighting Nix for languages with package manager, e.g. Python, which frequently uses packages not in nixpkgs.
As for last problem.. Yeah. It is a problem. x.x
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that works fine. As well as it ever does.
Really? I'm curious to read more. It works very well for me under Ubuntu these days, but if I can get it working equivalently well on NixOS I may legitimately consider switching.
First, this is a whole system specification. This means that executing this on Nix will build you a whole OS image. You can build the image if you have Nix by running the first line on file. You can also use Docker with the instruction on my README: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config (however, kexec will not likely work, read more how to run it later)
Back to elaborating on the Nix file from the gaming perspective. First, we have the overlays. These are like patches to the packages, and really useful for gaming because it allows building important packages like mesa from the source tip. This is particularly useful when new games or GPUs are released. Same thing for wayland: Nvidia and its proprietary drivers need some patching, but it's possible to get wayland (and sway) to work this way.
Then, I have taken the reproducibility of Nix to a next step in my opinion, and made the system stateless. This means that it runs from the RAM. It is easy to create installation media like kernel, initrd, and rootfs because you have all the steps to create the distribution. This means that here, Nix works as a meta-distro like Gentoo, on top of which you develop your own. Running from the RAM means that theoretically, if you have a working config, and two people with different hardware runs it, then they should have the same experience. If you look at ProtonDB, you often find that some people claim that game X works on their machine with drivers and mesa of Y and Z, but there is no way to copy their configurations because it's certain that the user has made some stateful changes which they have forgotten hence left undocumented, which is the reason it works for them. If everyone would be using Nix, you could reproduce their system and possibly fix your own, but this is not tractable with most OSs.
If you like to test my changes, you can read more about my approach here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/203750
For testing I distribute Nvidia as documented here: https://github.com/jhvst/jhvst.github.io/blob/main/ramdisk.m...
However, I have developed it bit further: if you manage to get into an iPXE shell, you can write `boot -a http://boot.ponkila.com/menu.ipxe`, then select the second option which is Nvidia (proprietary drivers), and with some waiting you will get into a shell prompt to which you can write `sway --unsupported-gpu`, which will launch sway. Cmd+Enter opens a prompt to which you can write `steam`, which will open Steam. Then, you have to mount some drive on another shell with `mount`, and add this as a Steam library via Steam's UI. Then you can play games. I use this on AMD and I have been very happy.
To get iPXE, the easy option is to go along with https://netboot.xyz. You will find the `iPXE shell` option here to which to write the boot option from the previous paragraph.
I also added AMD to the iPXE menu for whomever decides to test it. Sway is launched by writing `sway`. Steam should be started with `AMD_VULKAN_ICD="RADV" VK_ICD_FILENAMES="/run/opengl/driver/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json" steam` to use the faster RADV driver.
Though I've liked NixOS in the past, the documentation is an absolute mess. I've switched to GNU Guix.
In terms of documentation: the lines between nix-the-language, nix-the-tool, and nixos-the-system are often too blurry. Familiarity with one of the three is often assumed or implied.
Everyone seems to be using Flakes and/or home-manager; the official docs and tools all try to scare you away by labeling it unstable/experimental (if ever mentioning them at all), yet it seems difficult to find third-party resources that don't refer you to Flakes at some point.
The "getting started" manual is very good at getting you to a basic and very usable desktop system, but once you want to go anywhere beyond that, the difficulty (and complexity) immediately ramps up to crazy levels.
The references usually feel like they're complete, but I found it extremely difficult to find a simple answer to quite basic questions of the "how to do X" kind; e.g. I want to supply the same list of packages to python310.withPackages and python311.withPackages, to have both Python versions available system-wide (so I can trivially fire up an IPython shell and hack away at a simple problem). I solved this on other systems e.g. by using stupid text substitutions in a shell script, or calling "python3.xx -m pip -r requirements.txt", but it's still unclear to me how to do it with Nix - do I need to learn more of the language, or more about nixpkgs, do I stick with copy-pasting the package list, etc.
I wish the documentation was even 10% as good as OpenBSD's, but many commands don't even have basic man pages. It's definitely the most intriguing OS I've tried in many years, with a lot of promise for a return on the investment, it's just that it feels incredibly steep to get anywhere when you're just getting started.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you just want someone to shoot you straight: Documentation and naming conventions for Nix are absolute shit across the board. This will get downvotes, and people will say I'm wrong, but I'm 100% right. Go see yourself, it's bad. Language is called Nix, OS is actually called Nix, package manager is called Nix, just the whole thing seems like it was written in 1 week by a squirrel with 12 hands and a sack of ritalin…
That last sentence is so true. I'm all in on Nix and I couldn't elevator pitch it if my life depended on it.
Like Ansible but more bdsm.
Linux not making you feel superior anymore? Try Nix!
My experience with NixOS: Package installation is usually just from the official channel, system options can usually be done with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` and home-manager. Major problems: installing niche proprietary software that you may have to package yourself, and fighting Nix for languages with package manager, e.g. Python, which frequently uses packages not in nixpkgs.
For niche software, I found steam-run, or distrobox As for last problem.. Yeah. It is a problem. x.x
My experience with NixOS: Package installation is usually just from the official channel, system options can usually be done with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` and home-manager. Major problems: installing niche proprietary software that you may have to package yourself, and fighting Nix for languages with package manager, e.g. Python, which frequently uses packages not in nixpkgs.
The nix language itself is pretty straightforward and if you know haskell your should feel straight at home.
You shouldn't use nixpkgs python packages as a replacement for your python development. That would also not work that great on other distros.
I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?
If you just want someone to shoot you straight: Documentation and naming conventions for Nix are absolute shit across the board. This will get downvotes, and people will say I'm wrong, but I'm 100% right. Go see yourself, it's bad. Language is called Nix, OS is actually called Nix, package manager is called Nix, just the whole thing seems like it was written in 1 week by a squirrel with 12 hands and a sack of ritalin…
Yep; that's a bummer. The manual calls it the "Nix expression language", and some people refer to it as "nixlang" (similar to Gophers saying "golang")
> OS is actually called Nix
Nope, it's always NixOS; 100% of the time. In fact, the naming confusion goes the other way in this case, since the whole project (Nix, NixOS, etc.) lives on the domain nixos.org, and the GitHub account NixOS!
> package manager is called Nix
The commands are called Nix; but I personally find the idea of "package manager" just complicates things. Nix is more of a build tool, like Make; internally, it uses "derivation" to refer to anything from a text file to an entire OS. An application, like a music player, may involve many derivations (e.g. a derivation for its source code, a couple of derivations containing patches, a derivation for an interpreter with the required libraries, etc.); indeed the "actual program" in our $PATH is often just a script which invokes some other binary defined via a different derivation ;)
I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> learn both the nix language That seems weird to me. I don't have to learn package configuration language in other distributions. I thought that one could just install packages with a package manager. > You can use nix-alien[2] which will automatically fetch the required libraries and build an FHS shell for the binary. That's actually fine. I want to put closed source software into a chroot anyway.
> That seems weird to me. I don't have to learn package configuration language in other distributions. I thought that one could just install packages with a package manager. NixOS is more like a distro bundled with Ansible, so you can describe your entire system as code.
I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?
- You will have to learn both the nix language and working with nixpkgs. Learning nix is pretty trivial IMO (great resources are nix-1p[0] and Nix Pills[1]) but the documentation, while vast, is pretty shallow at the moment. You will likely have to resort to reading random blog posts, nix configs published by others and the source code of nixpkgs itself. - As mentioned by another commenter you will not be able to run…