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And it's unusable on small VMs, it takes like almost a gig of ram to install something and lots of time to figure out how to edit some config if it doesn't have

by zzzcpan 10y ago

And it's unusable on small VMs, it takes like almost a gig of ram to install something and lots of time to figure out how to edit some config if it doesn't have an option for your needs. So, yeah, if they want users - they need to work on that.

SwellJoe 10y ago
That's interesting, and not something I'd noticed (I have a 2GB NixOS VM for tinkering with it). That makes NixOS far less attractive for the things I was think it would be a natural for: containers. Because containers need to be reproducible, and because the current crop of container management and deployment tools are really messy, NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too, eventually). But, if it's not possible to custom build tiny containers on demand without needing a ton of memory, the power of it becomes less fun. I'm visualizing a system whereby you spin up custom environments based on need (with exactly and only the packages and config you need for the specific task, at hand), on demand, in a distributed environment. That'd be harder if the resources to spin up are very high. apt and yum both can consume a lot of memory when installing large lists of packages, but 1GB is pretty far out, and you can work around it by installing a small number of packages at a time. Which slows it down, but allows installation to work on even very small systems (like 128MB, or even smaller, if you've got a little swap).
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  > NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too, eventually) NixOS has support for hosting containers, which share the Nix store with the host, so they're presumably pretty lightweight. I've tried running NixOS in VMs, using Nix on Ubuntu, orchestrating things with NixOps, etc. and found that it's much more painful than just installing NixOS on the bare metal and managing everything via /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os is an experiment for a "pre-fab nixos"--i.e. a stateless images that do not themselves contain nix. I'd like to see this sort of functionality implemented in NixOS proper.

by zzzcpan 10y ago

SwellJoe 10y ago

That's interesting, and not something I'd noticed (I have a 2GB NixOS VM for tinkering with it). That makes NixOS far less attractive for the things I was think it would be a natural for: containers. Because containers need to be reproducible, and because the current crop of container management and deployment tools are really messy, NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too, eventually). But, if it's not possible to custom build tiny containers on demand without needing a ton of memory, the power of it becomes less fun. I'm visualizing a system whereby you spin up custom environments based on need (with exactly and only the packages and config you need for the specific task, at hand), on demand, in a distributed environment. That'd be harder if the resources to spin up are very high. apt and yum both can consume a lot of memory when installing large lists of packages, but 1GB is pretty far out, and you can work around it by installing a small number of packages at a time. Which slows it down, but allows installation to work on even very small systems (like 128MB, or even smaller, if you've got a little swap).

chriswarbo 10y ago
> NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too, eventually) NixOS has support for hosting containers, which share the Nix store with the host, so they're presumably pretty lightweight. I've tried running NixOS in VMs, using Nix on Ubuntu, orchestrating things with NixOps, etc. and found that it's much more painful than just installing NixOS on the bare metal and managing everything via /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
Ericson2314 10y ago
https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os is an experiment for a "pre-fab nixos"--i.e. a stateless images that do not themselves contain nix. I'd like to see this sort of functionality implemented in NixOS proper.