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Honestly after discovering NixOS I have a new found joy of administering Linux servers. It's easy and painless, everything is declarative and versioned, and new

Honestly after discovering NixOS I have a new found joy of administering Linux servers. It's easy and painless, everything is declarative and versioned, and new machines can be set up for new projects or scaling in a matter of minutes. This "cattle not pets" mentality doesn't make sense for everything and is highly inefficient if the OS itself seamlessly supports immutable workloads and configuration.

Underphil 5y ago
As someone who has to deal with legacy services from time to time I couldn't agree more. In certain industries, legacy software just doesn't scale at all.
notpachet 5y ago
When it comes to server admin, nothing is painless. You just may not know where you're bleeding yet.
- madjam002 5y ago
  Fine, “considerably less painful” then. The worst thing I’ve had to deal with recently is debugging some faulty RAM sticks and NVMe failure. Obviously hardware quirks are still at play and there’s not much that can be done there, but in terms of making life easier on the software side, NixOS and reproducible config definitely helps over traditional distros.
ayushnix 5y ago
> It's easy and painless It was probably the most difficult thing I tried to, unsuccessfully, use on my desktop. I imagine learning how to use Vim/Emacs as a complete beginner would probably be several magnitudes of order easier than learning the Nix DSL and the Nix way of doing things. And from what I've read about the experience of other people who do use NixOS and talk about both the good AND the bad, using it seems like an unhealthy relationship. Not to mention that the Nix package manager feels slow as hell and reminds me of my unpleasant hours spent using rpm and dnf.
- madjam002 5y ago
  I hear you, Nix definitely does feel slow and I must day over the few years I’ve been using it it has definitely slowed down even more. In terms of the DSL, I’m really surprised that people find it a problem as much as they do. When I first tried Nix I moved my first nonprod server over to it that very afternoon. It helped looking at the syntax to start with as “hmm this is a bit like JSON” and to worry about things like lazy evaluation later on. I guess it helped that I was familiar with JSONNET beforehand so maybe that helped. My first few servers I got by with just a basic understanding of the language and copying/pasting examples from the website and using https://search.nixos.org/options https://search.nixos.org/options Using on a desktop, now that is a whole other experience. I personally quite enjoy it for my desktop but there is definitely more of a learning experience and you might not find the benefits of Nix worth it anyway as your desktop is an always changing environment.
  - ayushnix 5y ago
    > I hear you, Nix definitely does feel slow and I must day over the few years I’ve been using it it has definitely slowed down even more. I don't know about others but once you become used to package managers like pacman and apk, it's a jarring experience to use apt and dnf, especially dnf. And Nix feels just as slow, if not slower, than all of them. I have to install hundreds of MBs of metadata before I can install a package with dnf and the fastestmirror=true has essentially been useless in the history of my years of usage of dnf. The end result is me downloading hundreds of megs at speeds less than 1MBps. > In terms of the DSL, I’m really surprised that people find it a problem as much as they do. When I first tried Nix I moved my first nonprod server over to it that very afternoon. I find it much easier to use a combination Ansible, python/shell scripts, and dotfiles on multiple git forges. This setup may not be as declarative as NixOS but it is much easier to grok and use. I have no motivation to learn an obscure DSL to manage my system.
hiptobecubic 5y ago
"cattle not pets" doesn't mean "use cloud images for everything." It means to do essentially what you're saying you do with nix. Hosts should be easy to make and easy to drop.

Underphil 5y ago

As someone who has to deal with legacy services from time to time I couldn't agree more. In certain industries, legacy software just doesn't scale at all.

notpachet 5y ago

When it comes to server admin, nothing is painless. You just may not know where you're bleeding yet.

madjam002 5y ago
Fine, “considerably less painful” then. The worst thing I’ve had to deal with recently is debugging some faulty RAM sticks and NVMe failure. Obviously hardware quirks are still at play and there’s not much that can be done there, but in terms of making life easier on the software side, NixOS and reproducible config definitely helps over traditional distros.

ayushnix 5y ago

> It's easy and painless It was probably the most difficult thing I tried to, unsuccessfully, use on my desktop. I imagine learning how to use Vim/Emacs as a complete beginner would probably be several magnitudes of order easier than learning the Nix DSL and the Nix way of doing things. And from what I've read about the experience of other people who do use NixOS and talk about both the good AND the bad, using it seems like an unhealthy relationship. Not to mention that the Nix package manager feels slow as hell and reminds me of my unpleasant hours spent using rpm and dnf.

madjam002 5y ago
I hear you, Nix definitely does feel slow and I must day over the few years I’ve been using it it has definitely slowed down even more. In terms of the DSL, I’m really surprised that people find it a problem as much as they do. When I first tried Nix I moved my first nonprod server over to it that very afternoon. It helped looking at the syntax to start with as “hmm this is a bit like JSON” and to worry about things like lazy evaluation later on. I guess it helped that I was familiar with JSONNET beforehand so maybe that helped. My first few servers I got by with just a basic understanding of the language and copying/pasting examples from the website and using https://search.nixos.org/options https://search.nixos.org/options Using on a desktop, now that is a whole other experience. I personally quite enjoy it for my desktop but there is definitely more of a learning experience and you might not find the benefits of Nix worth it anyway as your desktop is an always changing environment.
- ayushnix 5y ago
  > I hear you, Nix definitely does feel slow and I must day over the few years I’ve been using it it has definitely slowed down even more. I don't know about others but once you become used to package managers like pacman and apk, it's a jarring experience to use apt and dnf, especially dnf. And Nix feels just as slow, if not slower, than all of them. I have to install hundreds of MBs of metadata before I can install a package with dnf and the fastestmirror=true has essentially been useless in the history of my years of usage of dnf. The end result is me downloading hundreds of megs at speeds less than 1MBps. > In terms of the DSL, I’m really surprised that people find it a problem as much as they do. When I first tried Nix I moved my first nonprod server over to it that very afternoon. I find it much easier to use a combination Ansible, python/shell scripts, and dotfiles on multiple git forges. This setup may not be as declarative as NixOS but it is much easier to grok and use. I have no motivation to learn an obscure DSL to manage my system.

hiptobecubic 5y ago

"cattle not pets" doesn't mean "use cloud images for everything." It means to do essentially what you're saying you do with nix. Hosts should be easy to make and easy to drop.