4 ms·

No, I'm reinventing ChromeOS. I started on this project with my father in mind, to make it easier for me to maintain his computer. My father would not run NixOS

by hawski 8y ago

No, I'm reinventing ChromeOS. I started on this project with my father in mind, to make it easier for me to maintain his computer. My father would not run NixOS, but maybe I'm wrong. This will give a single image and very little tooling outside of end user parts. It probably will be much simpler. If totally seamless and _automatic_ updates can be achieved with NixOS I'm all ears.

zozbot123 8y ago
The point of the ChromeOS dual-partition scheme is that ChromeOS system installs are read-only and immutable - they're the equivalent to creating a squashfs live system and burning it to a fresh CD, so it wouldn't make sense to de-duplicate data among them. If you don't care about this property and need more flexibility than that anyway (as with the average Linux distribution, which is updating stuff in /usr all the time), snapshots are the sensible choice and the dual-partition scheme is quite pointless.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  I think fedora-silverblue is aiming for some sort of middle ground. It would be interesting to see how it plays out.
roblabla 8y ago
Put whatever update command (nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade I believe? haven't touched nixos in a while) in a crontab and you get automatic updates. If the update fucked it up, you can boot back into the previous configuration. In this way, it's really, really hard to brick a NixOS install. That's the beauty of it. Of course, it's not going to be as transparent as ChromeOS: If the update failed, you'll have to manually select the previous configuration in the GRUB menu. That's definitely something solvable with a bit of code though. So, yes, automatic and seamless updates can be achieved with NixOS, given a bit of configuration and maybe a bit of code. Whether it's the right approach for your use-case remains an open question though. NixOS has many other rough edges (many applications don't "just work" on it) which might make it a deal-breaker, depending on your use-case. But you might want to look into its update models, you might get some good ideas :).
- m45t3r 8y ago
  > Put whatever update command (nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade I believe? haven't touched nixos in a while) in a crontab and you get automatic updates. It is even easier, really. Just add the following to your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file: system.autoUpgrade = { enable = true; dates = "daily"; };
xaduha 8y ago
For desktop Linux I'd recommend https://getsol.us https://getsol.us, for everything else I'd use NixOS.

by hawski 8y ago

zozbot123 8y ago

The point of the ChromeOS dual-partition scheme is that ChromeOS system installs are read-only and immutable - they're the equivalent to creating a squashfs live system and burning it to a fresh CD, so it wouldn't make sense to de-duplicate data among them. If you don't care about this property and need more flexibility than that anyway (as with the average Linux distribution, which is updating stuff in /usr all the time), snapshots are the sensible choice and the dual-partition scheme is quite pointless.

bubblethink 8y ago
I think fedora-silverblue is aiming for some sort of middle ground. It would be interesting to see how it plays out.

roblabla 8y ago

Put whatever update command (nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade I believe? haven't touched nixos in a while) in a crontab and you get automatic updates. If the update fucked it up, you can boot back into the previous configuration. In this way, it's really, really hard to brick a NixOS install. That's the beauty of it. Of course, it's not going to be as transparent as ChromeOS: If the update failed, you'll have to manually select the previous configuration in the GRUB menu. That's definitely something solvable with a bit of code though. So, yes, automatic and seamless updates can be achieved with NixOS, given a bit of configuration and maybe a bit of code. Whether it's the right approach for your use-case remains an open question though. NixOS has many other rough edges (many applications don't "just work" on it) which might make it a deal-breaker, depending on your use-case. But you might want to look into its update models, you might get some good ideas :).

m45t3r 8y ago
> Put whatever update command (nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade I believe? haven't touched nixos in a while) in a crontab and you get automatic updates. It is even easier, really. Just add the following to your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file: system.autoUpgrade = { enable = true; dates = "daily"; };

xaduha 8y ago

For desktop Linux I'd recommend https://getsol.us https://getsol.us, for everything else I'd use NixOS.