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NixOS and my descent into insanity

ersei.net

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Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity

#21

Post by aendruk »

skulk wrote: post #17

> It looked cool, and I was getting kinda sick of Zsh being slow in big Git repositories. Sorry, what? If your zsh is slow in a big git repository, that's on you, not zsh. I honestly have a hard time taking anything else in this article seriously after reading that. edit: the article is good. I was being harsh. Nix is horrible, and yet I refuse to use anything else.

The author acknowledges this in the next sentence. A charitable reading would be that “Zsh” means “my Zsh”.

> I was getting kinda sick of [my Zsh] being slow in big Git repositories. Instead of fixing [my Zsh], I decided to give Fish a shot.

Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity

#23

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

rgoulter wrote: post #8
esafak wrote: post #4

As a fish user interested in Nix this put me off looking into it.

As a fish user on NixOS, I'd say nix is still worth looking at. The fish-related issues came from trying to manage the whole of the fish configuration with Nix. I think that's a fairly niche thing to want to do.

But isn’t that the Nix promise? That I can have a fully reproducible system defined by a few configuration files?

Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity

#24

Post by jahsome »

benreesman wrote: post #14

Le sigh, another day, another group of people turned off on NixOS for completely legitimate learning curve, documentation, and support reasons that are nonetheless heartbreakingly fixable. It’s never the user’s fault . Home manager is a well-intentioned and technically well-executed piece of software that is nonetheless a disaster as the “how to do dots on Nix” story, especially for newcomers. We need “Home Manager L…

I find nix incredible but the thing that I struggle with is trying to figure out how to do things on nixpkgs, and home manager in particular while not using nixos.

This is a critical use case for the apprehensive crowd like me who is averse to distro hopping, let alone willing to take on the paradigm shift of Linux-to-nixos.

The documentation for either is all but non-existent and the pages I can find are glorified source or man pages. Given how scalable nix, in the right use case, can make things, that's just not the modern experience it should or could be.

Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity

#25

Post by FireInsight »

jm4 wrote: post #13

NixOS is awful except for everything else out there. The learning curve is... steep. The documentation sucks. You have to learn a new OS because a lot of your prior Linux knowledge no longer applies. But, man, it's so slick when you get it working. It's so easy to understand your system and how it's set up. There's no weird stuff changing between updates that you don't know about. You don't have to merge new configur…

I use uBlue https://universal-blue.org/ with a custom image. It's basically Fedora Silverblue & co, except I can declare my default packages and Flatpaks and stuff in a YML file and then just rebase to the custom image that was built. I use Nix home-manager for configuring my shell and GTK, and plan to do as much with it as possible. It's genuinely one of the most stable feeling Linux systems I've run, especially with the Nvidia drivers being built in the cloud and my computer just getting the latest version automatically. Being Fedora, it's very up-to-date and uses new technologies like Wayland and Pipewire out of the box.

Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity

#26

Post by theLiminator »

k__ wrote: post #3
smoldesu wrote: post #2

> At this point I had a home.nix that spanned a couple of thousand lines. This is a bad idea, mostly because it's hard to manage. This has also been my experience with home-manager. The promise is great - it's like DLC for Nix that just Does More™. Then you get into it, and realize the modules are a lot more fragile and most of them are outdated. Then you're a few hundred lines in with workarounds, DBUS declarations…

Sad to see the Nix team can't get UX right. Their technology is on point.

I want to try nix, but honestly can't justify the time investment when pop_os just works for me.

Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity

#28

Post by Macha »

> There is one notable exception to programs I am not managing with home-manager, and that's SSH. Although it's pretty easy to use home-manager to manage SSH configurations, I'd prefer the security-through-obscurity of people not knowing my SSH aliases (since, y'know, I'm making my nix configuration public).

Tip I use for this:

End your ~/.ssh/config with Include ~/.ssh/config.local . Write ~/.ssh/config with whatever you're happy being public. Write your aliases into ~/.ssh/config.local. SSH will just ignore it if it's missing.

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