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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

#191

Post by pxc »

tinco wrote: post #164
kvark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, isn't a point of NixOS is that your updates are guaranteed to be smooth? I haven't used it, but your story now worries me. I don't want to be back at "just reinstall the OS" days, even if configuration is portable.

On NixOS installing any package is the same as reinstalling the operating system. Reinstalling the operating system just took a minute longer because it had to do more downloading. (edit: in theory, I actually bet that the certificates sneakily leak mutable state into the system with the expiry process, i.e. I bet that if I reinstalled the same version of NixOS with the same configuration, I'd get an install that wou…

> On NixOS installing any package is the same as reinstalling the operating system.

I've only ever noticed one difference: installing the bootloader only happens on nixos-install, not always on nixos-rebuild

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

#192

Post by totony »

catern wrote: post #189
totony wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reproducibility is not the only issue they're facing. I think the mentality extends to more than just fixing linker issues, e.g. this https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9656 At the end of the day, I much prefer trusting upstream than having to trust packagers to do everything right.

Having your screen locker which is written in C be setuid root is a really bad, really insecure idea. That it's supposedly being done for security reasons is replacing a minor, difficult to exploit security issue with something that's essentially guaranteed to be vulnerable. Upstream is clearly wrong here - whether that means slock should be patched to be sane, or that slock should just not be packaged at all, I coul…

The thread raises some valid points on both sides, but the slock issue is secondary to the real issue. Adding misc patches:

- Makes different systems behave differently - this makes bugs harder to track and confuses users

- Moves the trust from the software developer to both the software developer and packagers (who may not have the same expertise that the developer has)

For ex. #1: When you use software like slock, you presumably trust slock to do its job well. If you don't trust him enough in his choice to add setuid, then why would you trust him enough to use the screen locker?

I understand adding patches that are strictly packaging related if upstream is uncooperative (mostly I guess because nix is small), but changing behavior is another ballgame.

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

#193

Post by easygenes »

totony wrote: post #192
catern wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your screen locker which is written in C be setuid root is a really bad, really insecure idea. That it's supposedly being done for security reasons is replacing a minor, difficult to exploit security issue with something that's essentially guaranteed to be vulnerable. Upstream is clearly wrong here - whether that means slock should be patched to be sane, or that slock should just not be packaged at all, I coul…

The thread raises some valid points on both sides, but the slock issue is secondary to the real issue. Adding misc patches: - Makes different systems behave differently - this makes bugs harder to track and confuses users - Moves the trust from the software developer to both the software developer and packagers (who may not have the same expertise that the developer has) For ex. #1: When you use software like slock,…

There's always been the tacit assumption that using a package manager implies trust in the way that packaging is handled by that manager. Often people who handle packaging dozens or hundreds of packages over years actually ARE much more aware of the security implications of decisions made by developers of individual pieces of software.

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

#194

Post by suchar »

Apaec wrote: post #154
suchar wrote: post #48

I think NixOS would benefit from easily accessible collection of opinionated modules/profiles/configurations with minimal set of options. Something like gnome-desktop / sway-desktop / etc. Gnome actually does pretty good job here. The point is: currently my NixOS and Home Manager configurations have over 2k LOC total. When you search for configurations on GitHub/Google you are likely to find complex ones. For example…

Home Manager always seems like a unnecessary layer though. Why is it needed if you already control everything with NixOS?

My primary use-case for Home Manager is dotfiles management. This way I can keep them consistent across all machines and development containers (managed with NixOS declarative containers, so Home Manager configuration is applied on container startup).

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

#195

Post by hda111 »

tinco wrote: post #47
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

When you use Docker you probably don’t configure your websites using Nix so there is no deterministic build happening here? In Ansible it’s just a few lines of code to start a Docker container. I’m not sure how Nix really helps here.

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

#196

Post by tinco »

hda111 wrote: post #195
tinco wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

When you use Docker you probably don’t configure your websites using Nix so there is no deterministic build happening here? In Ansible it’s just a few lines of code to start a Docker container. I’m not sure how Nix really helps here.

In Nix it's also just a few lines to start a Docker container. I might be considered a heretic by the Nix community, but I don't believe in the advantages of Nix for software development / application configuration. Docker is the end all solution to that problem in my opinion.

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

#197

Post by pxc »

Apaec wrote: post #171
TeMPOraL wrote: post #9

What a coincidence. I was just asking about NixOS on Mastodon. Reposting (I'm on a mobile, little time to type): " a question on dev environment isolation. Is either #NixOS or #GUIX usable as an OS for day-to-day use (coding, browsing, occasional gaming)? Or is it better to just use their respective package managers on top of regular Linux? Also, anyone here doing desktop #virtualization? Is there a sense of running…

> #NixOS or #GUIX Two years user of NixOS here, moved after using Arch for about 3 years. Overall I'm really happy with it. I also evaluated Guix when migrating from Arch. My raw and honest opinion about it is that it's just an attempt at open source fragmentation with zero innovation(I'm not impressed by Scheme or Lisps) that uses GNU marketing/branding/philosophy to gain adoption. I decided not to waste any time wi…

> My raw and honest opinion about [Guix/GuixSD] is that it's just an attempt at open source fragmentation with zero innovation(I'm not impressed by Scheme or Lisps) that uses GNU marketing/branding/philosophy to gain adoption.

This is an extremely uncharitable take on Guix. I hope it doesn't take root in the Nix community, not least of all because it overlooks areas where Nix could stand to learn from Guix.

Guix is ahead of Nix with: • grafts • its excellent subcommand interface • documentation • explicit organization/structure for contributors • the bootstrap story • trusting/signing channels

and it also has some interesting differences in choice of abstractions at various levels, like its service system vs. NixOS' modules.

Guix's existence doesn't harm Nix users or developers in any way, and there's no need for this kind of hostility or dismissiveness. As a Nix user, I hope Guix flourishes.

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

#198

Post by eximius »

ris wrote: post #184
eximius wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair. It is, by far, the biggest hurdle to adoption and contributions. I'm a SWE and I don't grok it yet. Granted, I haven't spent a ton of time on it. But if you have to spend a ton of time on it, it has in some sense failed. It's harder to learn than literally any other language I can think of that isn't designed specifically to be esoteric. Most languages, after you have picked up a few, you can just…

> I'm a SWE and I don't grok it yet. I think the biggest difficulty most people have is that it's a pure functional language, and that is quite foreign to a lot of people, even many SWEs. It's something that's not going to change though because it's a fundamental part of why Nix works so well.

Haskell is easier to pick up than Nix.

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

#199

Post by capableweb »

porker wrote: post #177
capableweb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you can use docker-compose, docker, Kubernetes or anything else to achieve the same thing as NixOS. NixOS gives you a fully reproducible personal computing system, from boot config, window manager, partitioning to applications, home directories and everything in between. What mainstream options are available for doing this? Guix could be one option, but it's not mainstream so I'm not sure what…

You are talking past the comment that you replied to, and you haven't answered it.

Guess I'm missing the whole subject of this thread then. The submission is about NixOS, which is for full systems (like in personal computers), something you cannot build with either Docker nor Kubernetes, the technologies that WastingMyTime89 said seems to compete with NixOS.

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

#200

Post by deltasixeight »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #159
m45t3r wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we dislike is everything talking about the costs, and not the benefits. Exactly. I tried to push really hard our company to use Nix/NixOS (and maybe in our case nix-darwin too, since the majority of engineering uses macOS), but it never went anywhere (I did convert a few of my colleagues to use NixOS though). But why? Well, onboarding is a pain in my company. We have some Ansible scripts that always break in s…

Yeah I ended up working at a place that was already using NixOS -- as in developer laptops come with NixOS, and that was definitely a huge plus. Much nicer when the war is already won, and there is no class of macOS or Windows-using devs to appease!

What laptop models were you guys using?
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