Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I used to use pfSense but hated having a load of config and firewall rules created manually, it all felt quite brittle. Moved to NixOS almost 5 years ago now and haven’t looked back, my router config is in Git and I’m able to make changes with confidence. Best part is making a change/installing an update and being able to rollback if I mess something up. I also use Nixus to push new configs which has a nifty fea…
Can you share your router configs? I'd love to have a NixOS based router.
NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
81–90 of 201 posts
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#82I 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…
Sounds like they aren't very smart if they can't elevator pitch it.
Perfectly reproducible OS with easy rollbacks. OS never gets crufty, no need to reinstall every release version or two. Single configuration language for all apps and system components. Composable and shareble config modules at any level of abstraction, e.g. you can piece together many git repos to custom roll your OS. Isolated dependencies for every package, meaning no dependency hell (similar to docker). You can have multiple versions of everything running live. Ability to run temporary environments using the same config language.
Current OSes are like VAX or TRS-80 in comparison. Nix-likes are the future.
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#83My 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.
I wouldn't call them major problems. There are workarounds for running things without much effort if you want, e.g. FHS or steam run or distro box. For Python, you can create a virtual env and use it like any other machine. And if you do put in the effort to make a package, you'll never have problems figuring out how to install it in the future, and can share that gain with others. Making packages for nix is way easi…
Some packages won't work when installed via pip though, psycopg2 for instance.
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#84My router (a VM with passed through network card) is currently running on NixOS, I’m really happy so far, it makes kernel patching (which in my case is required for the nic to work properly at 2500BASE-T) much easier than manually patching and building the kernel every time. It also gives me the guarantee that I will be able to rebuild the exact same host almost bit by bit in the future, in case of necessity, which i…
Yeah I used to use pfSense but hated having a load of config and firewall rules created manually, it all felt quite brittle. Moved to NixOS almost 5 years ago now and haven’t looked back, my router config is in Git and I’m able to make changes with confidence. Best part is making a change/installing an update and being able to rollback if I mess something up. I also use Nixus to push new configs which has a nifty fea…
How are you managing the VM’s on NixOS?
A couple years ago I was searching for a good way to declaratively manage them, and the best I came up with was libvirt + terraform + nixos-generators for images. It feels like you should just be able to set them up as systemd units, but I couldn’t figure it out.
microvm has caught my eye recently but I haven’t played with it yet: https://github.com/astro/microvm.nix
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconding this. I ran Silverblue until recently due to some bugs in Kinoite but switched as soon as possible because GNOME sucks. Its the first distro I've used in 20 years that doesn't feel like a stiff wind could cause the whole thing to collapse and catch fire in an unrecoverable way, while still allowing me to run any software I want instead of just what is in some limited curated repo. And unlike Nix, I didn't n…
Does Silverblue still support traditional package managers? An immutable OS seems nice and I like Bubblewrap's isolation, but I would never switch full-time to an all-Flatpak distro...
You can install all the usual software from the Fedora repos, but you need to do a reboot before you can use it. See the Package Layering section here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/getti...
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience, any binary is going to need patching before it runs, because shared libraries are in weird paths. I especially had issues running Steam, but this was about 8 years ago — maybe the situation has improved now.
Steam still needs to be configured https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Steam but it's just a few lines in your config and then it works
That page is missing the opengl drivers which you also most likely want in the 32 bit variant.
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I used to use pfSense but hated having a load of config and firewall rules created manually, it all felt quite brittle. Moved to NixOS almost 5 years ago now and haven’t looked back, my router config is in Git and I’m able to make changes with confidence. Best part is making a change/installing an update and being able to rollback if I mess something up. I also use Nixus to push new configs which has a nifty fea…
Can you share your router configs? I'd love to have a NixOS based router.
One drawback I realized about NixOS as a router for home use is that if you need to share administration of the network, then it has to be easy for non-experts. In that case something like OpenWRT might be a better choice.
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#88I 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?
Nix feels to me like a cool but somewhat hacky v1 of a really great idea. I'm hoping someone creates a much more elegant successor.
If Nix is CVS or even Subversion, I'm hoping for Git.
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
- 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…
> 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.
On both NixOS and Guix System you can get by pretty well without learning the config langs or all the more advanced features. Only really becomes a problem if you need something new packaged. You can enjoy declarative package management with easy rollbacks without really learning more than any other distro.
Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconding this. I ran Silverblue until recently due to some bugs in Kinoite but switched as soon as possible because GNOME sucks. Its the first distro I've used in 20 years that doesn't feel like a stiff wind could cause the whole thing to collapse and catch fire in an unrecoverable way, while still allowing me to run any software I want instead of just what is in some limited curated repo. And unlike Nix, I didn't n…
Does Silverblue still support traditional package managers? An immutable OS seems nice and I like Bubblewrap's isolation, but I would never switch full-time to an all-Flatpak distro...
In addition to the sibling comment about layering, this is largely what toolbox is for. Essentially you create containerized environments with a lot of integration (you can run GUI apps from them) and install whatever you want in those.
toolbox create new_dev_env_or_whatever
toolbox enter new_dev_env_or_whatever
dnf install all_the_things
I have my issues with both Flatpak and Toolbox as far as how they're put together and work, but overall I find it to be a vast improvement on the status-quo way of doing things. YMMV, of course.