It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.
nix being 20 years old and still leaving decent documentation on the language it’s what hurts me the most, because the people who do know it works so some amazing things with it
nix is 20 years old?!? I thought it was relatively new like maybe 10 years old
the package manager was first released in 2003, so nearly 21!
Imagine if NixOS had as good a wiki as Arch. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with another distribution again.
They released their wiki apparently on April 1st.
So now we need just to fill it with the missing content. (which there is a lot). And it will be as good as the arch one… In 20 years.
Or smb made a bad April’s fool and actually their wiki is older.
The NixOS wiki’s been around for a few years at least, it just doesn’t get as much traffic from search engines since NixOS isn’t super popular.
I think what they are referring to is the official wiki at wiki.nixos.org (there also is / was an unofficial wiki)
Didn’t realize that was unofficial lol
Ah this makes sense since I started nixos 3 weeks ago and was sure I already was on a wiki before April. I believe the official one is also mostly copied from the unofficial one for now
Nixos has made me a better software engineer, I hope it takes off
I might just be basic but the only annoying part of reinstalling for me is setting up my browser again.
it’s all in
.mozilla.All hail Firefox Sync!🙌
firefox sync misses half my settings
Then you didn’t need them
I’ve used Firefox for over a decade but still wouldn’t trust them to keep all my account info on their servers, Especially not nowadays.
I already started using KeypassXC to locally store my passwords, just importing bookmarks and add-ons I’ve left to do.
I use file syncing (Syncthing) and symlinks to keep configs for some apps synced between devices. I don’t for Firefox, but it might work.
I’m still a newbie Linux user so haven’t fully delved into Symlinks…besides bricking a VM trying it once when following a guide.
Can I for instance link a folder where emulators or offline games store save data on my main SSD and have it automatically copied to a folder on my large HDD?
It doesn’t copy data, no. Symlink is short for symbolic link. So it’s a pointer to another location. But it might be useful for you. Taking a guess at your goal, here’s a relevant example.
Say you moved all of your emulation stuff stored under /media/largehdd/retroarch. You could then symlink that directory to ~/.config/retroarch like so:
ln -s /media/largehdd/retroarch ~/.config/retroarchThat data is still stored on the large drive but will now also show under that symlinked directory.
Yes you can, although this might be better done with rsync - and periodically runnind the syncing command.
But syncthing does basically the same thing plus you can sync between multiple devices on the same network.
I sync my laptop config with work pc this way.
Edit: typos, damn mobile
Mozilla are maybe the only company I’d trust with that
I think you can selfhost the sync server.
I only use Sync for extensions, history and bookmarks. I use an alternative pw manager for the same reason.
How often do you reinstall your OS? In practice never, I installed Arch around 8 years ago on one computer and that’s the install I have today still. I copied it twice to a bigger SSD but that’s kind of it.
I didn’t reinstall my OS because I wanted to. Ubuntu messed up the upgrade from 20 LTS to 22 LTS. There was some message in the console, but an hour later I forgot about it and shut off the computer without checking the message again
When it came back it was a terminal and I had no working WiFi. I googled how to do WiFi on Ubuntu from the terminal, but the answers all told me about the previous WiFi on Ubuntu and I didn’t even have that daemon
Eventually I wiped the drive and installed NixOS because it backs up your previous configs. When an upgrade fails you just undo and go to the previous working version.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s the best selling point for desktop use. For me it’s having all my configs for all my devices in a single place, checked in git, with bits of config I can easily share between my different devices.
There is a certain thrill when you nuke your disk to install a distro you never tried before. I actually just nuke one of my laptop last night to try void linux.
I’m reporting you to the Ubuntu police!
I was wondering if Void was still popular. It was kind of feeling like NixOS took all its hype
I’m guily of the hopping on the bandwagon from Void to NixOS. But out of curiosity for NixOS not frustration over Void. Void is awesome, it fits the completely subjective picture in my head of what Linux should be.
It is getting traction lately, the last few years. I myself am a Void user. Currently, I either install NetBSD, Debian or Void, depending on the use scenario.
Same. Even for Windows…why reinstall so much? I installed W10 1607 and I’ve just been installing updates. Same for my Linux machines. Just upgrade and be done people.
Hey, man. Some of us just suck at everything but reinstalling.
You clearly don’t have a software hoarding problem
Every few months or so? There is always that one distro that sounds cool and maybe it’s better than what you are using atm. Yeah, sure. It’s mostly a waste of time and I keep coming back to Arch after a few days, but without this drive I would not have ever tried Arch in the first place. So because of this I found my favorite distro, but I can also never be 100% sure it’s the best distro. Pros and cons, I guess.
No distros are cool. Computers are tools. Is one distro actively better at completing jobs you need to do? There the one you need.
Damn… 8 years? I made it almost two years with tumbleweed on my work laptop.
I like mixing it up, trying different diatros and various programs. After awhile, a fresh install just feels nice…
Maybe not useful for yourself alone, but the benefit of being able to share your entire config with others doesn’t sound bad
Could I maintain the same OS install for the life of a device? Sure. Can I resist disro hopping? Nope!
I made it, I think, 3 years on a Fedora install once.
Main machine was last installed with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Running 22.04 now. Gonna celebrate a tin anniversary this year! 🎊
Installed 22.04 few months ago, did my configs, and then subscribed to Ubuntu Pro (free for five devices). Now I can enjoy a stable experience for at least a decade.
Easy install is not the only benefit. You also get fearless upgrades. When I upgrade my Nvidia driver and it inevitably exposes bugs in one of my apps, I can always jump back to the previous build version without uninstalling anything.
Stop threatening me with a good time!
Meanwhile me using Fedora with pretty much everything setup the way I want it out of the box:
Blasphemy! How dare you not tweak your install!
I use Mint, BTW.
Or, they could learn Ansible and get 80% of the way, and be able to reproduce the result on more than one OS. 🥹
That is, until a new Ansible version breaks playbooks again, or an OS is updated in a way that messes with you playbooks, or a package is removed from the playbook but not the installed system…
Ansible is good for ephemeral containers or VMs, but any more permanent system will eventually deviate from the set configuration.
THIS. Or salt. You even learn something generally useful.
Nix is not something exclusive to NixOS, and people are already using it to make reproducible configs that work on more than one OS.
I’m even using Ansible in what I’m currently building with Nix, because it does one thing well that I need to do: distribute files and run commands on a lot of hosts at once.
…to get a working config, you need to learn a whole new programming language and figure out the tweaks for each package you want to install, so I’d argue the journey is just as long
not to mention how many things they want to go through their system. getting vim set up “their way” while also trying to install python3 support, vimtex, and plug-vim was almost impossible. not to mention finding a way to store the vim configs separately from the rest of nixos. (i use vim on multiple operating systems so switching everything to the nixos wasn’t a viable option.)
maybe there was a better way to do it that i didn’t know about, but boy did i try to find it.
you can just include dotfiles and the like in a nix config, while it’s not the recommended way it usually works
in my experience installing support for most things is way easier on nix, as long as they’re already packaged well. I’m still scared of the eventual time when I’ll have to create my own package for the nix store to install from source
i think i would’ve probably had to package the specific kind of vim that i needed, because i wanted neovim and a gui too or something. this was also like 3-4 years ago so its possible the documentation for this kind of stuff has considerably improved since i tried, or that there are now packages that make this sort of thing easier. and it’s definitely possible everything existed at the time and i just couldn’t figure it out.
but i ended up with a similar feeling to the one you described: stuff is easy when you do it their way, using their tools; but things are very hard to do if you deviate from the path.
i know this is just sort of an inevitable part of the design paradigm they use, and that everything probably works very nicely if you learn their language and the various ins and outs of the operating system, but i just wasn’t willing to commit that much to it.
I really like most of it and started to daily drive NixOS a few months ago, but there’s still some very valid criticisms to be made. Lack of documentation is probably the biggest one
i would like to give it another try at some point because it seems like it will probably feel really nice to use once i get the hang of it. but the lack of documentation is pretty rough.
i also think that for nixos, a lack of documentation is a much more difficult thing to overcome. other distros can piggyback off the arch documentation for most things, but that doesn’t work as well for nixos.
that’s certainly true. I’d like to help improve the documentation, but unfortunately I’m still pretty green at Nix myself, so there’s not much I can do at the moment. But it seems to be picking up speed recently, so there’s hope that with more people better documentation is coming soon
NixOS sounds like a way to avoid learning Linux by learning an abstraction.
I’d personally advise against NixOS as a first distribution for that matter. It’s a great distribution, but if you want to understand the underlying mechanics, start with something where you interact with them, like Arch or whatever.
That’s why I used to use arch btw
that’s why I only use my computer with raw system calls, shell is bloat
You guys use an OS? I just push the electrons around my motherboard manually with a little magnet on a toothpick.
Nix is to Linux what Tailwind is to CSS
Systemd sounds like a way to avoid learning Linux by learning an abstraction.
You keep my init system (and resolver, and timekeeper, and task scheduler, and container manager, and …) out your f**king mouth!
Still waiting for systemd-desktopd to drop.
I’m waiting for systemd to join the smart home revolution
systemd-toiletd
journalctl -u systemd-toiletd
Apr 08 20:53:23 shitter01 systemd-toiletd[4294]: massive deuce dropped
But, at least in theory, you’ll only do it once.
Well, I “did it” for an evening once, it was fun. The next day it got annoying REAL fast. But I do keep the config around, so I guess I can just go back to it eventually to keep doing it.
Until developers decide to do some changes here and there
I had no experience in nixOS, just went to the package website, it tells you exactly what to add to each section of the config.
Well not everything is packaged and when they aren’t it Can get more complicated to install since nixos doesn’t us the default file system layout
I haven’t tried that one but besides the package page there is the options pages that gives you the ability to define config info.
Yeah it’s been awhile since I looked at it but when I was managing my config for it with home manager it would straight up refuse to start.
Welcome to Linux; where your hardware and my hardware may act completely different. :)
It comes with a working config.
Adding applications and rebuilding is generally trivial.
The problem becomes if you want to use flakes or home manager, which you probably should. The config for those is complicated and poorly documented.
I don’t know the programming language. I’ve been running it for about a month now. If you’re not doing anything complicated or doing any crazy conditionals or running one config for 27 boxes it’s no different than editing a yaml.
It took me about 2 days to get Nvidia working properly with offloading that was my hardest task so far.
That’s not true.
You have to get PhD in functional programming first.
Wait, are you saying my degree has real world use?
Like everything with Nix, you pay a little more upfront to get a great experience later.
oh yeah, I daily drive NixOS and use it on my homelab as well
That’s why you go for GNU Guix instead, since it’s the same kind of concept but configured using the Guile Scheme you already know.
(You do already know Scheme, right?)
the Guile Scheme you already know.
⬅️➡️👊
I think Endeavour OS is like that too. I have 2 “unfixable” bugs on my arch installation that can never be removed. I have to manually do 2 annoying workaround tasks every time I turn on my computer before I can use it and this will likely never go away. I’ve been told both these issues can’t be fixed without a complete os reinstall and even then it might not go away. I booted into an Endeavour OS live usb and what do you know, both those bugs were fixed out of the box. Endeavour is based on Arch. The kernel it was running was a kernel number release after my installation developed both of these “forever” bugs.
Arch is great and all but holy fuck I’m sick and tired of this fucking bullshit all the time. One of these times I’m going to type sudo pacman -Syu and it will develop yet a third unfixable forever bug. This is the same shit that drove me away from Windows: uncontrollable degradation over time that can’t be fixed without os reinstall. Even Gentoo isn’t this unforgiving.
Skill issue
Try Void, stable AF IMO. I have yet to run into “unfixable bugs” (whatever that means). And even if there are, you open an issue pn GH and there will be a patch most likely. If it’s a kernel bug, you’ll just have to open an issue on the Linux kernel git repo.
Could you explain what these bugs are? I’m curious.
I can sympathize, but moments like that are good to test backup solutions. I replace the drive, pretend the first one died, and see how hard it is to start over. Turns out I’m not very good at backups and always miss stuff. :(
The end result is a bug fixed and some lessons learned.
Wow, you have sold me on installing Nix next. I’m a programmer and this sounds dreamy!
If you have time for that, you aren’t making the most of yourself. Goes for any hobby
No, I enjoyed more when my Ubuntu didn’t update in place and I wiped the drive because nothing worked
Depends, you can use Linux in a professional environment. I know people who do.
Edit: also arch installs are able to be semi-automated too. They don’t take that long to do manually either. The image is over exaggerating.
Full time Linux engineer here!
hi
With gentoo and arch you are learning how linux works. Replace nixos with salt or ansible and it can even get you a job.
Mhm. The exact same reason why I would recommend them to anyone that actually wants to know how Linux works, the dos and donts (like why having 2 or more package managers is a REALLY REALLY bad idea).
having 2 or more package managers
Are you referring to Bedrock?
No, just a bad experience trying to actually run 2 of them on the same system. One was the main, the other was supposed to “patch” what the first one lacked… and then I realized that compiling from source and packaging with the original (first) package manager is a lot less painful than trying to juggle with both of them.
NixOS is still a Linux system, and the configuration still translates to stuff you have in a very similar way on every other Linux system too (with the exception of what’s needed for the file system layout to work). It’s not some kind of magic. I’ve probably learned as much stuff applicable to general Linux distributions as while using Arch and Gentoo.
Of course, if you only use the high-level options and the graphical installer that may be different, but then comparing it to those distros is very disingenuous.
How many jobs opportunities ask for experience with nixos?
