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NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

nixos.org

21–30 of 201 posts

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#21

I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?

From my experience, any binary is going to need patching before it runs, because shared libraries are in weird paths. I especially had issues running Steam, but this was about 8 years ago — maybe the situation has improved now.

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#22
post #16

Is it like docker? Anyway trying my hand on Kivy. Work for once for iOS and android undder macOS. Then never so far. Trying Gm even of macOS. No. May be start again with this and try to install Kivy again

Nix is a package manager and NixOS is a distro. It's (very) kinda like a docker and gentoo combination done by haskell people

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#23

I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?

If you just want someone to shoot you straight:

Documentation and naming conventions for Nix are absolute shit across the board. This will get downvotes, and people will say I'm wrong, but I'm 100% right. Go see yourself, it's bad. Language is called Nix, OS is actually called Nix, package manager is called Nix, just the whole thing seems like it was written in 1 week by a squirrel with 12 hands and a sack of ritalin.

That being said a lot of smart people here and in my peer group swear it's the truth, despite none being able to elevator pitch it.

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#24
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having absolutely no fear going into an OS upgrade is one of the best parts of nix. If anything breaks, you can go back to your old config and be sure it’ll still work. Going back to an OS that doesn’t have this property feels like programming without version control.

Touching on that version control and Nix are the same thing. Would be cool if they merged in some system.

You may be interested in Flakes[0], which locks your nixpkgs (and other "inputs") to a specific known version.

Obligatory disclaimer, they're still in beta, but everyone's using them anyway. There's some ongoing work[1] before they're officially released.

[0] https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Flakes [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE-vLFMTXxM

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#25

My router (a VM with passed through network card) is currently running on NixOS, I’m really happy so far, it makes kernel patching (which in my case is required for the nic to work properly at 2500BASE-T) much easier than manually patching and building the kernel every time. It also gives me the guarantee that I will be able to rebuild the exact same host almost bit by bit in the future, in case of necessity, which i…

Did you base your router config on some existing template or did you just built it up from scratch?

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#26
post #23

I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?

If you just want someone to shoot you straight: Documentation and naming conventions for Nix are absolute shit across the board. This will get downvotes, and people will say I'm wrong, but I'm 100% right. Go see yourself, it's bad. Language is called Nix, OS is actually called Nix, package manager is called Nix, just the whole thing seems like it was written in 1 week by a squirrel with 12 hands and a sack of ritalin…

That last sentence is so true. I'm all in on Nix and I couldn't elevator pitch it if my life depended on it.

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#28
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't run binaries built for other distributions, without patching them

Sort of true, you can but it require a fhs environment setup

I wonder why Nix doesn't give every package a FHS env by default. In 2022 chroot and overlayfs should be available everywhere. Wouldn't that solve a ton of problems?

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#29
post #26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just want someone to shoot you straight: Documentation and naming conventions for Nix are absolute shit across the board. This will get downvotes, and people will say I'm wrong, but I'm 100% right. Go see yourself, it's bad. Language is called Nix, OS is actually called Nix, package manager is called Nix, just the whole thing seems like it was written in 1 week by a squirrel with 12 hands and a sack of ritalin…

That last sentence is so true. I'm all in on Nix and I couldn't elevator pitch it if my life depended on it.

"A completely repeatable setup all the way down."

Re: NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

#30
post #13

I might want to try some new Linux distribution so I wonder: what doesn't work in nix? What are its weaknesses? What about devices with non-free firmware?

- You will have to learn both the nix language and working with nixpkgs. Learning nix is pretty trivial IMO (great resources are nix-1p[0] and Nix Pills[1]) but the documentation, while vast, is pretty shallow at the moment. You will likely have to resort to reading random blog posts, nix configs published by others and the source code of nixpkgs itself. - As mentioned by another commenter you will not be able to run…

> learn both the nix language

That seems weird to me. I don't have to learn package configuration language in other distributions. I thought that one could just install packages with a package manager.

> You can use nix-alien[2] which will automatically fetch the required libraries and build an FHS shell for the binary.

That's actually fine. I want to put closed source software into a chroot anyway.

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