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Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

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Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#131

Post by SkyMarshal »

easygenes wrote: post #112
openfuture wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always guix... Using scheme for everything is great, for showcase and recent developments check this video on guix home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5cdtSfTpE0

Just note Guix is a GNU project so there’s no support at all for anything unfree.

There’s no official support for non-free but the GUIX community has created a number of channels for non-free packages. I believe this is the main one:

https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

More if you google “GUIX nonfree”.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#132

Post by easygenes »

abathur wrote: post #83
exdsq wrote: post #68

Having worked in a large Nix dev environment, the difficulty in understanding what was going on meant devops were needed for the simplest changes. Ended up being a blocker for every project I was on. Love the idea but really really dislike it in practice. NixOS is cool though.

With the naivety of someone who's never worked in _any_ large dev environment: I would guess for that to work (at this point, at least) every team would need either someone who knows Nix on the team, or at least on-demand access to someone floating? I feel like ~proficiency with Nix has is a bit of a superpower as a developer. It's an incredible lever. But I have no delusions about how hard some "easy" things are, es…

Shopify is a shop with about 1000 developers who use Nix on MacBooks. Here’s a video on one of their internal tools which is basically just a bit of chrome on top of Nix to run anything without installing it: https://youtu.be/VUM3Km_4gUg

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#133

Post by teitoklien »

astral303 wrote: post #44

To call this an interface for “ non-technical” users is an utter delusion.

People who will even approach tools like this , are never as “non-technical” as youre referring to.

Dev has made a great implementation for people who fear the terminal. Thanks to this now i can bring more of my friends to try tools like these.

I dont think the creator is delusional at all, The non-technical in this market is just different.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#134

Post by Ericson2314 »

KronisLV wrote: post #124
Ericson2314 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. If you like every 6 months (or merely every job change!) fuck with APT, your bashrc, etc. with a little stack overflowing during onboarding, whatever. It's too rare to be worth optimizing; I get it. If you switch projects every 2 weeks, the calculus changes greatly. I do work at one of them now, but I got into…

> Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector. Though maybe the industry here is lagging behind trends - only in the past 3 years or so Docker has started gaining a foothold and…

> I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector.

Hah!

Nix is super European, and from my American vantage point the more west you go, the fewer Nix users there are! I first learned of the whole Eastern Europe consulting phenomenon via the Nix community too.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#135

Post by ris »

exdsq wrote: post #106
abathur wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the naivety of someone who's never worked in _any_ large dev environment: I would guess for that to work (at this point, at least) every team would need either someone who knows Nix on the team, or at least on-demand access to someone floating? I feel like ~proficiency with Nix has is a bit of a superpower as a developer. It's an incredible lever. But I have no delusions about how hard some "easy" things are, es…

Yeah the env I worked in was managed by some of the core Nix devs so they went in 100% and used all of the cutting edge features. It ended up being utter magic to me and most others I know. Tens of thousands of lines of Nix code so trying to add a library to the build was practically impossible, some of the code was hidden in private repos because it was confidential etc but other repos imported it… gah!

I think one of the reasons it feels like this is with Nix, the guts of what people are setting up are all exposed, right there in robust code. You see what's going in to the sausage.

In comparison, I've worked in projects which distribute their components as .deb packages, and the difference is night and day, the latter being a nightmare of laborious manual steps and funny tools. To a user of a .deb file this is all opaque, but let me assure you the complexity is most certainly there in spades.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#136

Post by SkyMarshal »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #54
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So I don’t hate Nix, but I do have a lot of constructive criticism. Why not write a blog post? Probably some of those issues are known but no one works on them, so a reminder isn't bad. And for those that aren't, maybe someone picks it up and tries to fix it.

That's not a bad idea. I'll toss that on the queue.

Also considering posting your ideas to the Nix forums or possibly github issues, lots of activity there and you’ll probably get some good feedback before publishing.

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#137

Post by [deleted] »

dmitriid wrote: post #2

This will sound rude, but I'm more and more convinced that people immersed in nix have never seen a real person in real life. defined boolean expression reference true. wat. I'm a technical person, and I have no idea what this is. And for technical people? Literally everyone says that "nix is really hard to get started with". nix and nix-related developers, please, please find some real people and talk to them.

[deleted]

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#138

Post by easygenes »

exitheone wrote: post #116
vlunkr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that instead of upgrading, you had to wipe and restart doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for NixOS.

I think the important thing that did not come across very well is that "wipe and reinstall" with nix is so incredibly painless that doing it is even an option. The same would be very very painful with other distributions. A clean reinstall of your whole system with nixos takes maybe 30 minutes. Compare with the average "my Ubuntu upgrade failed" debugging session...

Yes, and speaking of… the fact that “generations” are a central feature which allows seamless rollbacks to previous system states means that if your upgrade fails you’re hardly ever more than a few minutes away from a functional system again.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#139

Post by zzzeek »

trenchgun wrote: post #127
amarant wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some somewhat confusing naming here, and I believe it is the cause of your confusion. There is a operating system named Nixos. It uses a package manager called Nix. The package manager can be installed in other operating systems. The package manager is configured using a functional language also called Nix. What you installed was either the package manager, or a interpreter for the language. They could've na…

I don't think it is confusing. There is a package manager Nix, and a distro built around it, NixOS. And the package repository Nixpkgs. What is confusing however, is that the configuration language and the package manager have the same name, Nix.

in my experience (writing SQLAlchemy) it's good to give all of the "" titles a suffix. That is, instead of having "Nix" and "Nix OS", you would have, "Nix Package Manager" and "Nix OS".

I had *exactly* the same experience with SQLAlchemy. for years and years, it was, "SQLAlchemy" and "SQLAlchemy ORM". The online discussion was always the same: "ORMs, I like ORMs, I dont like ORMs, blah blah blah" and constantly trying to say, "SQLAlchemy has a whole non-ORM part too!" and this was only vaguely received.

Problem was 90% solved by *changing the name*, introducing the new term "SQLAlchemy Core":

SQLAlchemy Core

SQLAlchemy ORM

now when people talk about SQLAlchemy, you will regularly see discussions with "I only use Core, not ORM" or "did you try that with Core?" There are still people who think SQLAlchemy is in its entirety an ORM but it's a vastly thinner slice of less engaged users -the path to understanding the different components is helped enormously by qualifying them all.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#140

Post by capableweb »

Azsy wrote: post #90
capableweb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems to me like it’s competing with docker and kubernetes and I have never seen a convincing argument about why it would be better. This seems to indicate a huge mismatch between what you think Nix/OS is compared to what it actually is. NixOS is for creating/maintaining systems, Docker is for running applications and Kubernetes is for running applications but across multiple servers, neither of those tools are…

The market you compete in is the market your users imagine you offer similar solutions. Not the market of how you describe yourself. Docker's features usually include "its easier to create and maintain a system". That Nix does this different and better doesn't matter when a user is just looking to solve that one problem. At that moment, for that user, Nix is just a fancy config manager with one click deploy features…

Again, misunderstandings seems to run rampant in this thread...

No, Docker doesn't maintain systems, it handles applications. No one runs systems inside of Docker. People run applications with Docker, and Docker itself runs on systems.

And no, Nix doesn't "do this differently and better", as what Docker does and Nix does is wildly different. Nix is for machines, not applications. Sure, a subset of features from Nix can be used like Docker, but that doesn't mean Nix and Docker is the same, no matter what you think of markets or whatever.

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