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Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

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Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#131

Post by XorNot »

edude03 wrote: post #77
rob_c wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically, I refuse to learn how to containerize. Just learn, use, promote best practices and stop forking the ecosystem _even_ further... There, I got that off my chest.

As a heavy container user myself - I've been using containers since I needed to build my own 3.x kernel to test them - docker doesn't solve the reproducibility problem nix solves - IE, I can make a Dockerfile that does `RUN curl foo.com/install.sh` and who knows if that'll work ever again. Nix on the other hand doesn't allow you to do IO during builds[^0] only describe the effect of doing the IO. [0]: Though apparent…

You can just store the actual container though. Which will reproduce the environment exactly, it's just not a guidebook on how it was built.

The value of most reproducibility at the Dockerfile is that we're actually agnostic to getting a byte-exact reproduction: what we want is the ability to record what was important and effect upgrades.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#132

Post by jonotime »

Zambyte wrote: post #63
_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 switched away from Nix OS and eventually landed on GNU Guix, which I have stayed on for about 4 years now. One of the main reasons I switched away from Nix was because of the language, and how underdocumented it all felt. GNU Guix was a breath of fresh air, using a language with decades of academic backing outside of the context of Guix (SICP was awesome for getting into it) and the whole system is very well docume…

Oh, I'm interested. Are you using it on servers, or desktop? My concern is the community is small, while Nix's has been booming.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#133

Post by bdd »

sigmonsays wrote: post #37

i use nixos on VMs, my desktop (Gaming and productivity) and servers. I use flakes for everything. I've painfully learned how to do everything I need. My only big complaint is updating systemd. I have yet to figure out the systemd update bug. Sometimes nixos-rebuild-switch takes my network offline when updating systemd. It's incredibly annoying to update a box and have it drop offline. My work around is to do a 'diff…

I believe https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/pull/372196 fixes this if you are using systemd-networkd. It was merged to master last week and made it to unstable branches (https://nixpk.gs/pr-tracker.html?pr=372196).

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#134

Post by Chris_Newton »

grep_name wrote: post #105

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 hu…

Have you come across Nix Package Versions¹ yet? If you’re looking to work around a recent bug or other unwanted change by installing a slightly older version of some package from nixpkgs, Marcelo Lazaroni built a nice page to help with that and wrote up an explanation² of how it works.

This only works for versions of your package that do exist in nixpkgs but aren’t currently the default for your chosen channel, so it doesn’t help if your channel is out of date and you want to install a newer version that hasn’t been packaged yet. But then that’s the case in almost any Linux distro if you rely on installing your software from the distro’s native package repo, and much the same solutions exist in NixOS as in other distros. Although if you’re really determined, you can also start writing your own derivations to automate building the latest versions of your favourite applications before they’re available from nixpkgs…

¹ https://lazamar.co.uk/nix-versions/

² https://lazamar.github.io/download-specific-package-version-...

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#136

Post by cpuguy83 »

pzmarzly wrote: post #96
jjmarr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. Nix is attempting to be better than containerization. Saying "improvements aren't necessary because we already have 'good-enough' technology" is a meaningful argument when the improvements aren't significant. In my view, they are significant because Nix can be used to create a fully featured OS instead of just a VM.

> they are significant because Nix can be used to create a fully featured OS instead of just a VM Look up Bootable Containers project by RedHat [0]. Fully featured OS built from a Containerfile, bootable on bare metal. I agree that Nix design is much better than Docker, and has a bunch of features that OCI ecosystem doesn't (e.g. remote builds[1], partial downloading of the build tree, non-linear build process[2], ni…

Yes buildkit can do this. You can also use buildkit to create a bootable VM, just that nobody is doing it. You can use estargz to fetch just the pieces you need from a dependency rather than the entire depdency as well. Really all of the things you mentioned should be possible with buildkit, just that the focus of most things is Dockerfile which has much more limited functionality (though some of the things mentioned above still apply to Dockerfile).

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#137

Post by foundart »

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 first heard of Nix a few years ago from someone who fell firmly into the camp of "the tools are the interesting part." Despite my reservations, perhaps because I didn't want my opinion of the person to lead me away from something useful, I started to mess with it. After about 30 minutes I decided it was not for me and have not touched it since.

I do keep an eye on Nix-related stories to get a sense of whether or not I should change that stance. So far, nothing has led me to change it.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#138

Post by jonotime »

sigmonsays wrote: post #37

i use nixos on VMs, my desktop (Gaming and productivity) and servers. I use flakes for everything. I've painfully learned how to do everything I need. My only big complaint is updating systemd. I have yet to figure out the systemd update bug. Sometimes nixos-rebuild-switch takes my network offline when updating systemd. It's incredibly annoying to update a box and have it drop offline. My work around is to do a 'diff…

Yup, I have had that several times too.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#139

Post by azeirah »

rob_c wrote: post #72
azeirah wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I use nix, the more I understand it's both. Nix is genuinely so fucking great, but the ecosystem and docs and language are a mess. It needs to be cleaned up, and things _are_ getting better. The core philosophy of Nix is so damn solid though, and that's the real innovation here. As long as its philosophy manage to stick around, then it's ok.

It's basically, I refuse to learn how to containerize. Just learn, use, promote best practices and stop forking the ecosystem _even_ further... There, I got that off my chest.

Huh? I use Nix to create containers. Nix is a programming language, a build tool, a package manager and an entire ecosystem of extremely powerful tools.

The entire reason why I use Nix in the first place is because it allows me to containerize with _better_ reproducibility than docker itself.

I do get where you're coming from though. It's not immediately clear that Nix can do all this stuff. Nix is a lot more than just "glorified weird package manager".

At its core, Nix is a way to specify dependencies in a mathematically sound manner. Once you have that pure dependency graph managed with Nix, you can start doing the _real_ fun stuff.

Like, you can containerize it. Or you can create a VM from it, or an ISO, or a NixOS distribution with _only_ that package installed.

Nix actually makes containerization _easier_, not harder. But yes, I empathize. Nix is a mess and it is difficult to understand, it will take a few more years before it is fully settled.

In the meantime? I'm going all-in on Nix (the philosophy, not necessarily any particular variant) because I really strongly believe this is the way forward.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#140

Post by stouset »

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 tend to agree. I also think both sides need to learn to better appreciate the other.

Without people getting shit done with the tools we’ve built, there would be no demand for better tools and no need to write them.

Without better tools, the things we can get done are limited. Better tooling is an exponent to our productivity. The things we can accomplish today would have been nearly unimaginable nearly thirty years ago.

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