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Why I love NixOS

birkey.co

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Re: Why I love NixOS

#21

Post by Macha »

bikelang wrote: post #5

I don’t any experience with Nix - but how does it handle software which runs its own updating processes outside the package manager? Specifically thinking about software like Discord, Slack, Docker Desktop, Jetbrains Toolbox, etc. Is the Nix-ism to just reject using such software?

So Discord, and quite a lot of software like this has actually two layers of updates. There's updates of the web page (which is basically writing a bunch of JS to the home directory) which NixOS does nothing to prevent, and then there's updates of the host program (i.e. Electron) which NixOS disables.

Jetbrains Toolbox is in a sort of different category with tools like Rustup, since it's a package manager of its own. If you manage your IDEs with Toolbox, then your IDE versions are "outside Nix" and not managed by Nix. It's just packaged into its own pretend FHS environment and then doesn't know anything about it being on Nix. That said, updates of Toolbox itself will need to happen through your package manager.

As a last comment, why run Docker Desktop on Linux at all? Like I understand on Windows and Mac - docker is inherently tied to Linux so the Windows/Mac apps abstract away the fact that it's running a VM and doing a bunch of port mapping and filesystem mounting under the hood so you can pretend it's not running on a VM, but on Linux I've always just installed docker straight onto the host.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#22

Post by Pay08 »

quchen wrote: post #16

The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn! I…

Obligatory Guix plug. I've found it way easier to understand, but it has teething issues that NixOS doesn't (latest for me was a few problems with DMs). And according to an acquaintance of mine, it works reasonably well with an LLM.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#23

Post by colordrops »

quchen wrote: post #16

The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn! I…

Flakes are de facto standard at this point. Expressions are easy once you get used to them - in fact the Nix language grows on many of us, including myself, once you internalize it.

Using AI to generate Nix config is a superpower. Because the entire system is declared in a single set of config, you can basically spell cast any system you want. I one-shotted a Linux distro with custom branding for boot, installation screen, and login screen, and VPN and dev tools installed and configured by default, at a fortune 500 tech company.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#24

Post by 0x457 »

loremm wrote: post #3

This is niche and HN is full of these back and forth comments. One thing which a particular type of crowd will appreciate is being able to apply simple patches to constantly-up-to-date packages. For an example, I love atuin but it, by default, skips commands starting with space. Currently it's not configurable and while I wait for time to submit a PR or for the issue to be resolved, make a single line `patch` which j…

Same but with kernel. What lead me to nixos: company gave me a laptop with iGPU that wasn't supported by any released linux kernel. There were patches waiting to be merged, with nixOS making an installer image that supports my machine was simple.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#25

Post by bikelang »

epolanski wrote: post #20

What I like most about nixos is that you can have deterministically cached packages you don't need to rebuild every time in your ci. It's also simple to setup dev environments with nix.

Nix in CI seems like a really excellent match. I don’t care much about the ATproto space - but Tangled has built their CI system on Nix and I find that really compelling. CI Caching is just awful with GitHub actions - so it made me disappointed that Forgejo went that route.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#26

Post by MarsIronPI »

quchen wrote: post #16

The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn! I…

I'm not sure if I live in some kind of parallel world, because I never had any problems grokking Nix or NixOS. I started with this book[0] and haven't ever really been confused.

[0]: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world

Re: Why I love NixOS

#27

Post by BoredPositron »

The problem I have with nix is that I just don't need another hobby. Keeping everything up to date in an ever changing environment like an os just looks like chore. I install my system and image it every week and keep maybe the initial and a monthly snapshot. Why would nix be better in my case? Maybe I am missing something essential but I also don't bork my system that often tbh.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#29

Post by bikelang »

Macha wrote: post #21
bikelang wrote: post #5

I don’t any experience with Nix - but how does it handle software which runs its own updating processes outside the package manager? Specifically thinking about software like Discord, Slack, Docker Desktop, Jetbrains Toolbox, etc. Is the Nix-ism to just reject using such software?

So Discord, and quite a lot of software like this has actually two layers of updates. There's updates of the web page (which is basically writing a bunch of JS to the home directory) which NixOS does nothing to prevent, and then there's updates of the host program (i.e. Electron) which NixOS disables. Jetbrains Toolbox is in a sort of different category with tools like Rustup, since it's a package manager of its own.…

This is a really helpful explanation - thank you!

Regarding Docker Desktop on Linux - yeah definitely not strictly necessary. Sometimes it’s just convenient to have a UI instead of fumbling around trying to remember some cli incantation to check for dangling volumes or what-have-you. I think ideally I want to move to Podman anyways - but I’m using pop_os as my dev distro at the moment and am stuck on an older version which doesn’t have their native `podman compose` implementation yet

Re: Why I love NixOS

#30

Post by redrove »

dangirsh wrote: post #28

My love for NixOS really became clear when I realized I never have to write Nix again by hand. A WIP NixOS config for working with agents: https://github.com/dangirsh/tsurf

Same. I have a full homelab and multiple macs, can’t say I’ve written a line of real Nix code by hand.

If you’re itching to try Nix, now is the time.

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