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Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI

machine0.io

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Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI

#26

Post by OhSoHumble »

EnigmaCurry wrote: post #8

I'm happy to see this, and I have lots of thoughts about this. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried. I am working [1] on very similar things, but I've been leaning more on the self-hosted path, my VM template targets libvirt and Proxmox VE with a single CLI api. I even have an experimental branch that targets DigitalOcean. For VMs e…

I tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not.

I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of Nix just seemed to be divorced from pragmatism.

An example of this, years ago, was that I wanted to do something VERY simple: codify the creation of a directory in NixOS. It took me 6 HOURS to find the relevant code for doing that. I couldn't even get an answer out of the Discord server.

I don't know if I'll ever pick it up again. The learning curve was incredibly steep and it's just not on job descriptions and I've never worked in a shop that has used it. I tried it out as a curiosity, found that it was hair pullingly frustrating to use, and moved on.

Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI

#27

Post by bwm »

OhSoHumble wrote: post #26
EnigmaCurry wrote: post #8

I'm happy to see this, and I have lots of thoughts about this. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried. I am working [1] on very similar things, but I've been leaning more on the self-hosted path, my VM template targets libvirt and Proxmox VE with a single CLI api. I even have an experimental branch that targets DigitalOcean. For VMs e…

I tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not. I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of…

Yea, I totally get it. The thing is agents change the game. You no longer need to worry about the learning curve or how best to implement.

Just point your agent at a machine0 VM and say "make a machine that does X", then you get code you can use to build on any nix box and you'll always get the same result.

Once you experience this, it's hard to go back to a "traditional" OS, you'll want to nixify everything :)

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