NixOS Linux

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Re: NixOS Linux

#81

Post by chaorace » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #52

chaorace wrote: post #29

I played with NixOS and am willing to admit that it was too difficult. It's probably great for devops, but it's just slightly too rigid for my own personal use. Let me give an example: let's say you want to use xmonad on top of Plasma. NixOS doesn't have any simple way to configure that. You have the mutually exclusive options for one or the other, basically. I know Nix is powerful enough to do this, if I wanted to g…

> it's just slightly too rigid for my own personal use. I get what you're saying, but the reality is the opposite. Nix is _far_ more powerful and flexible than anything you can do in Arch. It sounds to me like you just wanted a particular packages available, and Nix didn't have that. But if you have the inclination to learn Nix, you will be able to customize your system, in a safe and repeatable, declarative approach…

It was simply too difficult for me to do that. I learned the language, built derivations, then realized it was just way too much work for what I wanted. I like what Nix brings to the table, but, ultimately, I was perfectly happy to compromise the bullet-proof integrity of nix for the simplicity of pacman + aconfmgr. It's the perfect blend for use on my own daily drivers.

With that being said, I would use NixOS over arch + aconfmgr 10 out of 10 times in a production DevOps environment. What time/effort you give up in terms of instant usability is immediately recovered when you start working in terms of modular and widespread system deployment.

Re: NixOS Linux

#82

Post by nvarsj » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

chaorace wrote: post #81

nvarsj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just slightly too rigid for my own personal use. I get what you're saying, but the reality is the opposite. Nix is _far_ more powerful and flexible than anything you can do in Arch. It sounds to me like you just wanted a particular packages available, and Nix didn't have that. But if you have the inclination to learn Nix, you will be able to customize your system, in a safe and repeatable, declarative approach…

It was simply too difficult for me to do that. I learned the language, built derivations, then realized it was just way too much work for what I wanted. I like what Nix brings to the table, but, ultimately, I was perfectly happy to compromise the bullet-proof integrity of nix for the simplicity of pacman + aconfmgr. It's the perfect blend for use on my own daily drivers. With that being said, I would use NixOS over a…

I agree with what you're saying. It probably took me about 2 weeks to build my first NixOS desktop about a year ago. Now I manage everything in a single repo, including all my dotfiles, all via nix. It works great. But there was a very steep learning curve.

After that experience, I'd actually hesitate to use NixOS in a production environment. The main problem is Nix and the library functions themselves are incredibly obtuse. It also doesn't help that it's a dynamic functional language, so everything just looks like magic when you're first using it. I think most engineers would really struggle with it. I'd be more comfortable introducing Haskell - I think it's easier to learn and understand!

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