NixOS is great. Nix the language is just awful. I still use it for my Dev laptop and for Home Manager on all my devices.
Why I love NixOS
61–70 of 323 posts
Re: Why I love NixOS
#62nix & nixos are by far the worst way to manage system configuration, except for any other way that's been tried. imagine if there was something with declarative system configuration _not_ written in an insane undebuggable recursive nightmare of a language/stdlib? oh well, I'll keep using it, because what other options are there?
Re: Why I love NixOS
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same. Can't imagine going back to the status quo where my system is the accumulation of terminal commands over time instead of a config file.
Not to mention the non-idempotent python + bash + ssh hell of Ansible, or awful DSLs such as Salt, Puppet, Chef, etc.
Re: Why I love NixOS
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of us use NixOS/nix yet haven't read any documentation nor hand-written nix ourself. That's Claude Code's job.
I would have never become a power user of Linux were I used LLM to do the installation of Gentoo once upon a time. :( So do you guys not know much about the distro you are using, or how does this work? I honestly thought your comment was sarcasm, but apparently it is not.
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 ];
Re: Why I love NixOS
#65What 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.
This is exactly why I made https://nix-ci.com/
And it supports Forgejo, GitHub, and GitLab.
Re: Why I love NixOS
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only. Claude Code has to be actively steered, because while it knows some nixpkgs it surely doesn’t know it enough. E.g. it was absolutely incapable of fixing lldap settings after system upgrade from 25.05 to 25.11. It just prodded around blindly, producing meaningless configs instead learning how the module works. NixOS docs work for me, but I tend to just go for the nixpkgs source instead. Manuals document optio…
You don't have Claude Code git clone nixpkgs and home-manager for local reference? I feel you on the nix store + nix eval death loop, though it gleans real info. If I weren't on the Claude Max plan I'd probably feel more of the pain. And context is now 1MM tokens which means you're not running out just as it's starting to piece things together, heh.
I do, but it somehow tends to forget how to do things right now and then - despite having notes in memories system - and starts to do them in its own weird ways.
I’m going to experiment with skills next, or maybe make it build a few helper scripts for itself to quickly get some module source from nixpkgs matching flake.lock without having to think of it all. I’m positive about Claude for nix management, merely saying it’s not something that “just works” for now and reading nix code is still on the human part of the tandem.
This said, to be fair - when it gets the approach right, it excels. I was setting up Ente for photos backup and sharing, and it produced a nice overlay with custom patches for my needs from just “figure out why /shared-albums/ redirects wrong and fix”. Found the module, the package, pulled source, analyzed it, proposed a patch (settings weren’t enough), did it - I only had to test, and only because I haven’t provided it with a browser. Felt amazing.
Re: Why I love NixOS
#67NixOS kind of extends the idea of reproducible builds. Any snapshot could be a guarantee that things just work. This can also be extended onto the user base - if one user has solved a problem, it should be solved for all of them. So we can jump from guarantee to guarantee here.
My only gripe with NixOS is Nix. I think that this is also the biggest drawback of NixOS. I don't have an alternative; but perhaps it may be better to allow any format to be used, rather than force nix onto everyone.
Another issue is that, for a reason I don't quite understand, a few years ago NixOS' quality appears to have gone down, e. g. nobody cares about documentation anymore. This is probably not a huge obstacle per se, but I did not feel I should invest that much into nix (which I dislike) when the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Ironically this also means that the whole idea behind NixOS, falls flat, if the documentation is poor. They really should make the same guarantees for their documentation, just as they do for the software ecosystem too.
Nobody cares about documentation anymore though - AI has won. Just try finding high quality documentation via google search; it is slop world now.
Re: Why I love NixOS
#68nix & nixos are by far the worst way to manage system configuration, except for any other way that's been tried. imagine if there was something with declarative system configuration _not_ written in an insane undebuggable recursive nightmare of a language/stdlib? oh well, I'll keep using it, because what other options are there?
guix would like a word
Re: Why I love NixOS
#69What 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.
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Re: Why I love NixOS
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have never become a power user of Linux were I used LLM to do the installation of Gentoo once upon a time. :( So do you guys not know much about the distro you are using, or how does this work? I honestly thought your comment was sarcasm, but apparently it is not.
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…
> Unless you're brand new to Linux or computing, it's not a mystery what a given nix config change is ever doing.
I am not brand new - and I don't know what the heck the config is doing.
That is why I rely on documentation.
The "code is self-explanatory" is always an attempt to not have useful documentation and try to rationalise that problem away.