Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I love NixOS

birkey.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 323 posts

Re: Why I love NixOS

#271

Post by beepbooptheory »

dml2135 wrote: post #257
beepbooptheory wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you are not reading or comprehending the config file, why does it make any difference? You ask AI to purge ffmpeg from your system, it will probably know more about doing that with apt than with nix, right? And if the input on your end is "remove ffmpeg from my system" or whatever either way , what's the need for nix? You will be much happier just editing /etc files and such in the standard way, rather than ho…

For me, the difference is that there is no way in hell that I want to give an AI assistant full access to configure my system live. With a declarative config, the only access it needs is to an isolated git repo.

But if the declaritive file is not read/understood, what is the difference? At some point, you're gonna run sudo nixos-rebuild, and that is the whole system on the line.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#272

Post by hombre_fatal »

afishhh wrote: post #245
hombre_fatal wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NixOS is high-level declarative, so you're reading high-level config diffs when the AI agent is pitching changes. Unless you're brand new to Linux or computing, it's not a mystery what a given nix config change is ever doing. You can probably guess what this does: networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 8080, 9000 ]; The things to know about the OS are high level things. The rest of its idiosyncrasies you learn just…

> [ 8080, 9000 ] Fails to parse is what it does... Are we really living in times where people can't write a single (syntactically) well-formed line of code in a programming language they use? I understand this doesn't really matter when just using NixOS Slop Edition™ but man I hate it.

You hate that I couldn't remember whether nix has array delimiters on the spot?

Jeez, tough crowd.

Though it also kinda represents this pride over triviality that some people latch on to in the AI world which is odd since it's also only a mistake a human would make. Had I run my hand-written comment through a proofreading clanker, I would have spared you the negative emotional reaction.

In the pre-AI world, you would have probably not been so harsh since it's understandable that someone make that mistake with such an idiosyncratic language like nix that almost nobody writes full-time. Yet in the AI world, you demand more from humans.

Something interesting, there.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#273

Post by rowanG077 »

troad wrote: post #265
rowanG077 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at a lot of nix package expression: Quite a bit. Besides, just taking a way a single brace gives 7 hits. Still a ridiculous level of nesting. So I don't go with your reasoning that these are some kind of super special cases. If something happens so often in 4500 lines of code you cease the right to claim it is special.

It happens 1/2290 (0.04%) of the time. You are significantly more likely to guess a stranger's birthday totally at random (0.27%) twice in a row (0.07%). If you don't consider that exceedingly rare, then you and I need to hit up Vegas immediately. You are projecting a programming style onto Lisps that's quite alien to them. Lisps tend towards small, discrete functions that are composed together. It is the ordinary la…

There are 101 `(package` definitions and 58 out of them have more than 6 nest level, which I would consider more than excessive. That's an incidence of over 50%.

Beside I don't think I'm alien to the functional way of writing things. I write mostly Haskell professionally. But Haskell doesn't casually suffer from making insane expression nesting the default.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#274

Post by jmmv »

I started playing with NixOS recently in a VM and... while I don't have much experience with it yet, it feels _great_ for the many reasons described in the article. I really like configuring a file and knowing that the rest of the system aligns to whatever that file says: no more, no less.

The language is "interesting" and I haven't had to learn it in depth yet. Claude and Codex really make it easier to get started with Nix's weirdness -- but that's unfortunate because I feel I'm not going to learn the "real thing" otherwise. And this difficulty makes me curious about Guix though because, even though I'm not LISP expert either, at least I can read it.

Anyway. I'm just shy to "dig deeper" on NixOS because my servers are FreeBSD and I'm already feeling the temptation to swap them with NixOS, which would feel like a betrayal to these long-lived installations... ;-P

Re: Why I love NixOS

#275

Post by tombert »

jmmv wrote: post #274

I started playing with NixOS recently in a VM and... while I don't have much experience with it yet, it feels _great_ for the many reasons described in the article. I really like configuring a file and knowing that the rest of the system aligns to whatever that file says: no more, no less. The language is "interesting" and I haven't had to learn it in depth yet. Claude and Codex really make it easier to get started w…

I feel like if you want to learn Nix with some hand-holding, resist the urge to use Claude Code or Codex, but instead just use the chatbot in the browser or something. Ask it questions, explicitly copy and paste in errors as they come up, and manually copy and paste out the generated stuff.

I found that this gives a good compromise of being able to learn Nix relatively well, but still having a "tutor" to help when things get tricky. I'm reasonably ok at Nix now, and can generally figure out what I need to do without AI assistance, but I'm glad I had ChatGPT when I was getting started with it.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#276

Post by newsoftheday »

schindlabua wrote: post #58

After having done the switch to nixOS, I can confidently say that managing a system any other way (like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts) really is neanderthal technology and nix is superior in every single way. It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.

> like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts

I just use apt, been doing it for 20 years, it works great. I've never in my time, heard of or knew anyone who wrote 20 (or any) bash script wrappers around apt. The one year I was painfully forced to use a Mac for work, brew worked similarly to apt, just used it, no need to wrap it with shell scripts.

Comparing highly functional and capable systems like apt and brew to neanderthal technology sounds like hype.

> It's also great for the AI era

That also sounds like more hype, similar to the pro-nix other comments so far which tout AI and similar to the article which I did read, also sounds like hype.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#277

Post by tombert »

kgwxd wrote: post #242
tombert wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm not going to say I'm enamored with the language, but I think the Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in because I really don't hate the language so much anymore. I mean, I'm only ever using it for configurations, and I think I'd still prefer writing Nix than YAML. I probably wouldn't like writing a full "program" with Nix, but I don't think anyone does that?

Sounds like every programming language on the planet. Just skip the "i'm unfamiliar with it, so i hate it" phase, and everything will be fine. People spend more time repeating that simple POV, using thousands of varying words, than is healthy. Just shut up, and do the work. And if you're not going to put in the work, just shut up, and let everyone else get to work.

I mean I don't know that I agree with that completely. Languages can still be actively awful even if you do learn them.

I have written a lot of PHP. In order to learn it I bought several books, I've done a dozen or so projects with it at various jobs, I've written both trivial and non-trivial things, and I have come to the conclusion that PHP is an actively terrible language [1]. It's inconsistent and hard to write in any kind of maintainable way with an ugly syntax and generally-crappy performance for any kind of logic beyond CRUD.

[1] At least version 5, which is the last version I've used. I've heard 7 is better but I'll never know because I swore an oath in blood that I would not do PHP again for less than a million dollars a year.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#279

Post by brungarc »

I love NixOS and nix-darwing too. Specially now that I can use it without having to learn a bunch of stuff before even getting started. My coding agent is great at it.

Re: Why I love NixOS

#280

Post by accelbred »

ulbu wrote: post #195
accelbred wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does guix have a flake equivalent yet?

different ui. you can pull in different commits of channels (packages repos) and take packages from them. but it’s opt-in, no lock-file snapshots. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Inferiors.htm...

The lock file is the major feature I'm missing.
Post reply on HN