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I think this is quite a fair commentry (although I quite like the Nix language personally) - as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop. For me it shines on servers and development environments.
> as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop that's not every encouraging :)
> ZFS on Linux [...] The recommended way to do this is to use LUKS, not native ZFS encryption. FWIW I've been using native zfs encryption on nixos and it works great. It lacks neat features like being TPM-backed or having multiple keys, but if all you need is password-based encryption then I think native ZFS encryption is better since you'll be able to do encrypted zfs send/recv, you'll have granular control over whi…
I use NixOS, one of the annoying things to me is the documentation and error reports. I swapped my installation to a Flake managed install a few months ago, and parts of my Nix files that were perfectly fine before started throwing out errors (specifically HomeManager), which no amount of Googling the error message that gone thrown got me any closer to a solution. I looked at documentation recently to try and enable…
I have a suspicion that because the Nix community is disproportionately likely to contain early adopters, the general mood in the forums is less risk-averse than I am with my primary stacks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop that's not every encouraging :)
To counterpoint this, I'm an happy nixos desktop user. It's not perfect, but still vastly better than a non declarative distro for my taste.
> ZFS on Linux [...] The recommended way to do this is to use LUKS, not native ZFS encryption. FWIW I've been using native zfs encryption on nixos and it works great. It lacks neat features like being TPM-backed or having multiple keys, but if all you need is password-based encryption then I think native ZFS encryption is better since you'll be able to do encrypted zfs send/recv, you'll have granular control over whi…
I think the main reason ZFS's native encryption isn't recommended is that there's known bugs in its implementation, especially around key rotation and send/recv.
Is that still the case? I thought the send/recv bugs at least were squashed a couple years ago?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. Your TLDR is spot on. Yes, my intent was to be on desktop use since most things I read dont consider that specifically. I did talk about how I would keep this running on some simple home servers since I think that's where Nix shines. But some of my servers are raspberry pis, which I mentioned I am worried to run Nix on due to resource limitations. I should probably just try it.
I wish remote build/deploy for Raspberry Pi was in a better state - it seems like a perfect fit for NixOS. I've got x86 servers running NixOS that are deployed using Colmena, but it seems to fall apart when I add cross compilation into the mix.
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' and when systemd is updated, I reboot manually and only update the boot image.
I think this is quite a fair commentry (although I quite like the Nix language personally) - as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop. For me it shines on servers and development environments.
1. I use Nix primarily on the desktop (2 laptops, 2 workstations), though I also use it on one server. I don't think I could ever go back to any other Linux distro for my daily-driver. Things "just work" to a degree that they never have for me on e.g. Ubuntu.
2. I quite despise the Nix language; this is not to say that I think it's particularly bad (or good) as a language, just that nearly every single degree-of-freedom in language design that is largely about personal taste takes the opposite choice to what I would prefer
3. I find setting up development environments with it to be very hit-or-miss, to the point where I have in some cases fallen back on what I would do without nix, and used nix-ld to fill in the gaps.
Trying to get Eduroam working soured me on NixOS as a desktop/laptop OS. If conventional methods fail, you're left with a completely non-standard OS designed to prevent quick hacks. But NixOS spoiled my entire mindset around Linux. Going back to anything else feels like a massive downgrade. We would be better off today if declarative operating systems became the standard back when they could.
I'd like more clarity on this: > The advantage over docker here is that (when using Flakes) Nix builds are completely reproducible. Docker containers may be isolated, but surprisingly they are not deterministic out of the box. With some work you can make docker deterministic, but thats what you need, its much easier to use Nix. as the whole purpose of the Dockerfile is to create a reproducible environment.
A more trivial example of non-deterministic would be that you can write a Dockerfile that uses curl to fetch data from random.org; the functions nix provides for fetching from URLs require you to specify the sha-sum of the data you fetch.
Nix flakes make it hard for you to inject anything into your dependencies that hasn't been hashed to confirm its identity. It in many cases still isn't 100% deterministic (consider e.g. a multithreaded build system where orderings can influence the output), but it's a big improvement.