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Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

dgt.is

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Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#101

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

pkkm wrote: post #95
Baeocystin wrote: post #65

The older I get, the more I realize that so much of the divide in the tech field is simply between the two camps of "the tools are the interesting part" vs "getting things done with the tools is the interesting part".

Your veiled implication that Nix and NixOS aren't about "getting things done" is, I think, more than a little unfair. I'm using multiple programming languages at work. Each one of them has its own dependency manager that does basically the same job as the other ones. In Python it's Poetry, in Ruby it's Bundler, in JavaScript it's npm/yarn, in PHP it's Composer, etc. A lot of projects require extra setup steps outside…

That is not why neither Bazel or Buck was created.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#102

Post by pzmarzly »

_huayra_ wrote: post #55

I've been on the fence about Nix. I've wanted to love it (and do love the concept), but between the Waiting-for-Godot situation for flakes, the weird language, and the occasional political infighting I've seen pop up about the community, I still haven't switched. I'm no language expert, but I genuinely don't understand why it wouldn't have been better to build some equivalent DSL in Haskell to do this given the simil…

I'm using Universal Blue now (Aurora, i.e. KDE flavour) and I'm very happy with it. With its large amount of pre-installed packages and drivers (including proprietary ones), I still didn't need to install any custom package (rpm-ostree) or otherwise modify the OS config (except for turning off SELinux in /etc/sysconfig/selinux). It's the most pragmatic distro I've used so far.

SaveDesktop[0] (saves flatpak apps and DE configs) and mise-en-place[1] (declarative shell environment manager) are making my installation backupable and quite reproducible (not to NixOS standards though).

For software that's not in flatpak, docker or mise, toolbox[2] and distrobox[3] are available for the rescue. Both work really well (toolbox seems better for CLIs, distrobox for GUIs), but all atomicity/declarativity is lost.

[0] https://github.com/vikdevelop/SaveDesktop

[1] https://mise.jdx.dev/

[2] https://github.com/containers/toolbox

[3] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#103

Post by 0x457 »

It reads like the author didn't even try to understand NixOS.

> But not always. Why? Because there are so many ways the context can vary as everyone is doing different things. Is that config you found:

This whole section reads like author gives ChatGPT code snippets and asks it to explain.

Nix snippets are not very copy-pastable because everyone creates different abstractions to reduce boilerplate. I have probably done "JSON -> list of packages" conversion 3 different ways in my codebase.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#104

Post by pkkm »

eacapeisfutuile wrote: post #101
pkkm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your veiled implication that Nix and NixOS aren't about "getting things done" is, I think, more than a little unfair. I'm using multiple programming languages at work. Each one of them has its own dependency manager that does basically the same job as the other ones. In Python it's Poetry, in Ruby it's Bundler, in JavaScript it's npm/yarn, in PHP it's Composer, etc. A lot of projects require extra setup steps outside…

That is not why neither Bazel or Buck was created.

It's not? I recall reading that coping with a variety of languages was one of the main motivations, but do correct me if I'm wrong and you have a citation.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#105

Post by grep_name »

I've been using nixOS on my laptop for over a year now and I still don't have an answer for 'my version of firefox/darktable has a bug in it, but I can't update it without upgrading the entire rest of all the software installed on my machine.' I keep thinking there has to be a way around this, but it doesn't seem like there is one that's clean and not hacky / brittle. Other than that I love it, but that's a pretty huge caveat

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#106

Post by 0x457 »

tombert wrote: post #68

I love NixOS, it's my daily driver on my personal laptop, but it definitely has given me more than its fair share of headaches. If everything you're going to do is in Nixpkgs, great! Nix will mostly "Just Work" and you'll get all the nice declarative goodness that you want. Since Nixpkgs is constantly getting updated, this isn't that weird of a thing. The thing that's been most annoying to me is when I try and run ge…

Love NixOS and Nix in general (just not the language). I've started using `steam-run` to run things I'm too smooth brain to port.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#107

Post by pzmarzly »

soraminazuki wrote: post #39
RestartKernel wrote: post #5

Trying to get Eduroam working soured me on NixOS as a desktop/laptop OS. If conventional methods fail, you're left with a completely non-standard OS designed to prevent quick hacks. But NixOS spoiled my entire mindset around Linux. Going back to anything else feels like a massive downgrade. We would be better off today if declarative operating systems became the standard back when they could.

Wi-Fi should just work like any other Linux distro, assuming you have a desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma installed.

eduroam is not your everyday WPA{2,3}-PSK, it's WPA2-EAP. There are official shell scripts to provision certificates, but they only seem to work on major distros, and for some reason the eduroam website made different scripts for every university. Also, for most people this is their first (and last) experience with 802.1X, especially setting it up themselves.

In my experience few years ago, it was a pain to set it up on everything except macOS and iOS (which come with eduroam certificates preinstalled in their trust stores).

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#108

Post by 0x457 »

sshine wrote: post #64
lolinder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I haven't switched my NixOS to flakes yet. The community discussions always act as though flakes should be the default that everyone should use now, but I figure that the developers know what they're doing and haven't made them the blessed path yet for a reason. So far so good—my system is far more stable than it was under Debian and I've yet to run into anything that didn't have an easy answer. I have a…

> I figure that the developers know what they're doing and haven't made them the blessed path yet for a reason. My take is: flakes don’t align with centralised nixpkgs and ultimately don’t solve any problems that can’t be solved without flakes. They’re just an interface for a decentralised module system. You can use them, they’re feature-complete, and they don’t align with nixpkgs: it doesn’t make sense for individua…

> My take is: flakes don’t align with centralised nixpkgs and ultimately don’t solve any problems that can’t be solved without flakes.

I've turned to flakes to specifically solve some problems, and flaked solved them. To this day, flakes are still the only way to solve them.

Flakes aren't default due to political reasons.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#109

Post by tombert »

0x457 wrote: post #106
tombert wrote: post #68

I love NixOS, it's my daily driver on my personal laptop, but it definitely has given me more than its fair share of headaches. If everything you're going to do is in Nixpkgs, great! Nix will mostly "Just Work" and you'll get all the nice declarative goodness that you want. Since Nixpkgs is constantly getting updated, this isn't that weird of a thing. The thing that's been most annoying to me is when I try and run ge…

Love NixOS and Nix in general (just not the language). I've started using `steam-run` to run things I'm too smooth brain to port.

I will say that once I found out about Flakes it bothered me a lot less. I find them a lot easier to test and it's nice to be able to easily define a custom little environment for them and then just do `nix run` afterwards.

It's been especially useful to be able to specify exact versions of wine and winetricks installs on a per-game basis.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#110

Post by samsquire »

Baeocystin wrote: post #65

The older I get, the more I realize that so much of the divide in the tech field is simply between the two camps of "the tools are the interesting part" vs "getting things done with the tools is the interesting part".

I enjoy writing tools.

How do you feel about Kubernetes?

It would be good to have some interesting tasks to do?

I think the tools should do also much of the work. I actually prefer batch systems that are a simple execution of a program against a dump which are just process all the data and generate data with the new states than a networked online system that breaks all the time and due to DNS

Micro services keep me awake but a simple CSV processing I can fix in my own time.

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