Good idea, bad DSL and toxic community.
I’d been hearing a lot about NixOS so I did a VM install. It wanted me to setup my own partitions manually without even giving preset sane defaults like I was back in 1994 installing Slackware.
Nope. My OS is a tool, not a lifestyle.
it wanted me to setup my own partitions manually
You’ve obviously never used nix, it’s GUI installer can auto configure just fine.
When your OS AND apps are declared and stateful a lot of risk and complexity is removed. Configuring is just a bad experience with poor usability and worse documentation.
How long ago did you try? You should try again, I did not have this experience setting up with the graphical installer a few weeks ago.
Slackware still does that in 2024.
Sounds like you haven’t done it in a while. It has calamares installer now.
This is the opposite of me. I always get nervous when I don’t have precise control over how the disk layout looks. I explicitly decided for the non-graphical installer when I first downloaded NixOS
I need to compile my kernel… by hand with tools from beige-age computing.
The obvious sane default is 1 partition covering the whole disk, + EFI system partition. What’s there to offer…
Encryption? Also you’re assuming there’s only one block device…
assuming the person before did not just mean partitioning, but also all other storage-related tasks
I mean, if we’re talking sane you shouldn’t need more than one partition.
My OS is also a tool!
Those jerk OSs and their bullying!
Where do you draw the line though between tool and lifestyle? At setting up partitions (which is a trivial thing I would not mind at all)?
There is a Gnome/KDE installer too now ;)
So, I’m an arch-btwistan, what does nixos do for a gamer/youtuber/low-tier-wannabe-musician? Legit asking, because I really don’t know what makes nixos tick, and the (very little) I’ve read doesn’t really explain the benefits of it
nothing imo, it’s main benefit is making reproducible environments, imagine you need 10 machines to have the exact same things running on it, setting up each one would be a PITA and keeping them the same is near impossible, nixos solves that problem.
it’s not gonna do anything for you, most people just want a working OS system on your PC so that you can do the things you need to do, if you have that, there is no reason to be fucking around with nixos.
Everything about your OS is defined in a config files and can be rebuilt. You break something you don’t need to do a complete reinstall if you can’t figure it out. Just rebuild the last working configuration. Sharing builds with your friends is easier.
For gaming getting your graphics card going is much simpler. I never had steam and proton games run as well as they do with they nixos defaults
For gaming getting your graphics card going is much simpler. I never had steam and proton games run as well as they do with they nixos defaults
you clearly haven’t used EndeavorOS then, since there everything just works.
It sounds like a Dockerfile for your system OS?
Basically but it’s better, nix has a unique way of doing the underlying the logic which as is own benefits. Also since nix is not a container it doesn’t have any of the speed penalties that come along with that. Since nix is functional as well, it means all operations can be undone. So where you might te build a docker image from scratch or by using a A/B system like other immutable distros it allows nix to just modify the system while it’s running with minimal side effects.
nix has a unique way of doing the underlying the logic which as is own benefits.
Honestly, this is what I like least about it. I do not like unique, single-purpose Domain Specific Languages. To me, requiring use of a DSL that is not like common languages used for similar purposes is a major detractor.
Guix!!!
Docker, ansible, salt, yeah
Very well built patches and ways to share them. This is a good thing for gaming as we can try bleeding edge like Arch. But without having to rely on AUR or scripts to copy locally. Thanks to Nix Flakes you simply reference the flake someone shared (after double checking what is in it) and rebuild a NixOS derivation and voila, patch installed. I installed a complete SteamOS in 1 minute with this, reboot and everything works. Even with your locally signed in Steam account 👌
Imo the worst part of nix is how it turns into this chicken or the egg scenario. Let me explain, nix is very good at reproducing things. It ensures that all things are the same when installing a piece of software. Once someone writes a nix module, generally speaking, it “just works”. You can always take that nix file and get it to run the same way on another machine. But since most gamers/musicians don’t give two shits about reproducible software, it doesn’t get packaged. And with no packages they will never be interested to get into nix.
As I write this though I realize, many open source projects have struggled with getting contributions from the community. Personally, I just think nix solves the issue of “idk, it works on my machine” better than anything I’ve seen. Being able to reproduce software and stop dependency issues is a very valuble thing, just not for everyone.
Have tried, had bad experience trying to get damn libs to work with clang, gave up and went back to Arch
I love the nix package manager on fedora atomic
Tis fairly good, don’t like how badly it works with grub tho (which I refuse to change)
This makes arch/nixos a difficult combo to set up
Does it? I have two VMs on remote VPS servers that use GRUB because of no UEFI and I had no issues
Might be cause the PC in question I’m testing on does have uefi,(which nixos recommends system senior loader for)
My argument for using it is: it works very well for every other Linux distro, so it should work well with nixos too, uefi or not
No arch, only NixOS! RAAHHH!!!
Heck yeah brother, AROOO
Fuck yes, I would follow that fox wherever needed!
as a fox myself, i would not recommend it.
Hmmm, how can you type then?
Suspicious!
i am sneaky fox, i break into your house, i steal your keyboard, and then i shitpost on lemmy, steal your pasta, and then leave unbeknownst to you.
they using the tongue
👁️🫦👁️
Yes. And I feel sad because I haven’t been excited on any other OS for years after learning NixOS. I used to be excited about playing with things like FreeBSD, but now they all feel like something’s missing…
Not for everybody, but as a software engineer nix/nixos is blessing.
Same, I could not go back now.
Its especially annoying for me because i wanna go back to something that “just works” but i miss the nix features. I like declaring my system but managing packages declaratively is just such a pain. I just wanna do apt-get install package its just easier i dont want to rebuild my whole ass system. Something i found that may work is using nix for the system and then distrobox for packages. Yall think thats something that would work well?
Separate your system and user lists. Use home-manager for example for your user packages. I think separating those configs is the official recommendation.
As for the rest, I’m using nix on MX because of declarative package management. Screw going back to imperative and having to remember what packages to install. If it’s something I use often it goes on a list, if I don’t
nix shellcomes to the rescue.I’d rather mess around with dev envs for nix than distrobox.
Just install it to your profile
Can’t you just do the package install via nix-env rather than the config file
Yep, running on 2010 laptop. works great.
Don’t listen to him! Just start using Nix to manage dependencies and dev environments for your projects but keep your OS the same until you are really good at Nix
How does that work? Let’s say I’m on pop os developing a thing, how would I manage deps and dev envs with nix then? In a VM or what?
I’m a Linux nerd, but I totally don’t get nix. Tried to install some nix package manager on my Debian based distro and it was completely broken (the nix thing, not my os)
I um… didn’t get started yet. But a colleague demoed it to my and it’s kind of between virtual environments and containers, if you’re familiar with Python.
You write a Nix config and specify exactly which versions of which package you want to have. Reproducibility is the main selling point of Nix. Things don’t just break overnight because a dependency of a dependency of a dependency got upgraded. You can always go back to exactly what it was like before. Guaranteed. That’s pretty cool.
Ok so you got that config, then you build and activate it, and it replaces your shell. You enter the Nix shell. You still have access to all your files and directories, but your Nix config controls exactly which versions of your tools you have. gcc, npm, python, maven, whatever you use.
You can see why this makes people want to build an immutable OS.
The main drawback of Nix is that it has a bit of a learning curve. Hence why I haven’t started yet. Maybe it’s time though.
Yeah, you want to sniff nix first before you mainline nixos.
Yeah, you want to sniff nix
MMMMH, lice killing cream 🤤🤤
Nah, best way to learn is to fuck your shit up until you fucked it back into a usable state
I want to but COSMIC DE.
You can absolutely install Cosmic with Nix
How do you do that?
You can use this flake to add cosmic to your configuration
One thing that no-one tested is the overhead of all the sandbox, like, each module, lybrary of program run in a sandbox(some times they tweak the source code not need the sandbox) so I wanted to see the overhead of all of that
It build in a sandbox, but it’s not run in a sandbox.
I don’t understand, if you run a program inside the sandbox and the program ask for a library, the kernel need to map the library from inside the sandbox to the program, that overhead that I’m talking about
This is not how NixOS works. Programs directly link against libraries in the store. There is no sandbox by default when running the binaries.
But it’s not run in a sandbox. I’m not sure where you get this from.
Too gimmicky
Guix is amazing.
i nuked my nixos install twice to install guix and twice I went back to my nix setup. GuixSD is missing a certain polish to it. It feels like it’s on the way there but probably not yet…
the second time was just last week, after setup on sway, I installed flatpak apps and tried setting up nix-env for packages, some XDG_DATA_DIR fucked up and I couldn’t even see the installed packages or start them from a terminal
servers are also slow and rebuilding is a fucking pain
On Kubuntu right now, but planning to switch to NixOS when I get a new laptop
