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I'm not really anti-nix, but never really understood the appeal. Linux is already a niche market, and this is some subset of that. I've been running a home gr

I'm not really anti-nix, but never really understood the appeal. Linux is already a niche market, and this is some subset of that. I've been running a home grown Arch variant for years without a single issue. Why someone like me would want to type everything out as some config language is beyond me. I could likely completely nuke my setup and redo it all in less time and effort than learning Nix. In fact, I can say it takes about an hour - I usually do it anually.

MarcScott 5y ago
For me the appeal of NixOS is that I never have to nuke my setup. I probably used to do that about three or four times a year when I was running a Debian variant. I'd get lazy and install a bunch of stuff globally with apt and pip and then not really know what state my machine was in, then nuke it and start afresh. With NixOS I know what state my machine is in all the time, can transfer the configs to another machine, and never have to nuke it. I don't know the Nix language, and haven't bothered to learn it. I do understand my own config files though and steal from others if I need to.
- silisili 5y ago
  Thanks for your experience. To be clear, I never reset because I have to, just to clear things out. Despite what anyone says, things do get funky. For example, I noticed different behaviors and tools between wpa_supplicant and iwd. Deleting iwd left me in a working but half state, as the ips stayed the iwd way. That times hundreds over a year really makes things weird.
  - soccerdave 5y ago
    Except with nix it doesn’t make it weird. If you delete iwd and something stops working, then you can just roll back to the previous generation of the nix store that included iwd.
jordanbeiber 5y ago
Linux, niche?! Idk where you’ve been, but Linux is ubiquitous and runs everywhere. It’s about scale mainly. A nixos host can be viewed as a solid state environment, in some respects. At least from a systems management perspective. If you scale up to more than one host, that you want to keep in a completely manged state, nothing really beats a model like nixos (or guix, although I lack experience). Having the complete system state of n machines, where n > 1 nixos is hard to beat. I have extensive experience with tools such as ansible and salt, but the state management of nix is just unbeatable. It’s, IMO, “how it’s supposed to work”. And with nixos you usually don’t have to nuke anything - a new system generation is enough.
- silisili 5y ago
  > Linux, niche?! Well, on the desktop. As someone using it as such since 2000 or so, it never took off like it deserves imo. > where n > 1 I guess this is where I lack experience, thanks. I just run single user locally. It feels like containers/kube won the n>1 market.
  - jordanbeiber 5y ago
    Yes, I’t a matter of perspective I guess. Having managed many thousands of hosts over the years, I’ve longed for something like nixos. Managing largeish scale infra is not what I do these days, but nixos still appeals to me, and I use it for a few pi’s, a nas and my workstation. I’ve never tinkered less with my machines, and I love it. With nixos ad-hoc tinkering is not “the way”, and using a shell.nix for different project folders is just awesome. I imagine this could help scale dev teams as well.
rgoulter 5y ago
> I could likely completely nuke my setup and redo it all in less time and effort than learning Nix. In fact, I can say it takes about an hour - I usually do it annually. Right, this is pragmatic. I think most of the people on NixOS at least tried using Nix on Linux or macOS first, liked the taste of it, and then wanted to try at the OS level. The most accessible benefit of Nix is if you're using multiple computers, Nix makes it easy to get the same versions of the software you use on each. I thought that was useful for vim/tmux/fish. Where I'm optimistic for Nix in the future, for developers, is that Nix is great at describing the packages for a development environment. It's neat to just have a single command to run & have everything ready, compared to hoping that the README contains the right package dependencies for your distribution.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
I used Arch for a long time but I always find that I couldn't keep a consistent configuration across multiple machines. The machine I used most often would quickly grow numerous augmentations and changes that I would be missing on my laptop and desktop. There are tools like etckeeper and numerous dotfile managers but most lacked the capability to recognize the machine's state/hardware (e.g. laptop, desktop, server, etc.) or only managed dotfiles but not /etc. Overtime the best configuration tended to be just using the defaults because getting used to a tmux.conf on one machine would just become an annoyance one I was on a machine without it. (Plus now you need to use about 12 different configuration languages :)) A huge advantage Nix has over any other configuration tool is that is a single source of truth. A normal dotfiles repo doesn't know anything about the actual programs or OS so it's very easy for it to become incompatible with a machine's actual state. On Nix, tools like home-manager [1] especially when used in a flake-template like devos [2] just solves this problem really well. It's very easy to make a change, switch to the new configuration, and then commit the change. Managing bespoke services and scripts is very easy because one file in Nix can create a service with a script's contents, create a user, install necessary packages, etc. I think (desktop) Linux is partly a niche market because the management can be very complex. Nix is certainly very complex itself but its structured enough that it can create very simple systems. There are already several NixOS based OS's that are basically just configuration templates. I could certainly see a more user-friendly distro being released using Nix as the foundation. [1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2] https://github.com/divnix/devos https://github.com/divnix/devos

MarcScott 5y ago

For me the appeal of NixOS is that I never have to nuke my setup. I probably used to do that about three or four times a year when I was running a Debian variant. I'd get lazy and install a bunch of stuff globally with apt and pip and then not really know what state my machine was in, then nuke it and start afresh. With NixOS I know what state my machine is in all the time, can transfer the configs to another machine, and never have to nuke it. I don't know the Nix language, and haven't bothered to learn it. I do understand my own config files though and steal from others if I need to.

silisili 5y ago
Thanks for your experience. To be clear, I never reset because I have to, just to clear things out. Despite what anyone says, things do get funky. For example, I noticed different behaviors and tools between wpa_supplicant and iwd. Deleting iwd left me in a working but half state, as the ips stayed the iwd way. That times hundreds over a year really makes things weird.
- soccerdave 5y ago
  Except with nix it doesn’t make it weird. If you delete iwd and something stops working, then you can just roll back to the previous generation of the nix store that included iwd.

jordanbeiber 5y ago

Linux, niche?! Idk where you’ve been, but Linux is ubiquitous and runs everywhere. It’s about scale mainly. A nixos host can be viewed as a solid state environment, in some respects. At least from a systems management perspective. If you scale up to more than one host, that you want to keep in a completely manged state, nothing really beats a model like nixos (or guix, although I lack experience). Having the complete system state of n machines, where n > 1 nixos is hard to beat. I have extensive experience with tools such as ansible and salt, but the state management of nix is just unbeatable. It’s, IMO, “how it’s supposed to work”. And with nixos you usually don’t have to nuke anything - a new system generation is enough.

silisili 5y ago
> Linux, niche?! Well, on the desktop. As someone using it as such since 2000 or so, it never took off like it deserves imo. > where n > 1 I guess this is where I lack experience, thanks. I just run single user locally. It feels like containers/kube won the n>1 market.
- jordanbeiber 5y ago
  Yes, I’t a matter of perspective I guess. Having managed many thousands of hosts over the years, I’ve longed for something like nixos. Managing largeish scale infra is not what I do these days, but nixos still appeals to me, and I use it for a few pi’s, a nas and my workstation. I’ve never tinkered less with my machines, and I love it. With nixos ad-hoc tinkering is not “the way”, and using a shell.nix for different project folders is just awesome. I imagine this could help scale dev teams as well.

rgoulter 5y ago

> I could likely completely nuke my setup and redo it all in less time and effort than learning Nix. In fact, I can say it takes about an hour - I usually do it annually. Right, this is pragmatic. I think most of the people on NixOS at least tried using Nix on Linux or macOS first, liked the taste of it, and then wanted to try at the OS level. The most accessible benefit of Nix is if you're using multiple computers, Nix makes it easy to get the same versions of the software you use on each. I thought that was useful for vim/tmux/fish. Where I'm optimistic for Nix in the future, for developers, is that Nix is great at describing the packages for a development environment. It's neat to just have a single command to run & have everything ready, compared to hoping that the README contains the right package dependencies for your distribution.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

I used Arch for a long time but I always find that I couldn't keep a consistent configuration across multiple machines. The machine I used most often would quickly grow numerous augmentations and changes that I would be missing on my laptop and desktop. There are tools like etckeeper and numerous dotfile managers but most lacked the capability to recognize the machine's state/hardware (e.g. laptop, desktop, server, etc.) or only managed dotfiles but not /etc. Overtime the best configuration tended to be just using the defaults because getting used to a tmux.conf on one machine would just become an annoyance one I was on a machine without it. (Plus now you need to use about 12 different configuration languages :)) A huge advantage Nix has over any other configuration tool is that is a single source of truth. A normal dotfiles repo doesn't know anything about the actual programs or OS so it's very easy for it to become incompatible with a machine's actual state. On Nix, tools like home-manager [1] especially when used in a flake-template like devos [2] just solves this problem really well. It's very easy to make a change, switch to the new configuration, and then commit the change. Managing bespoke services and scripts is very easy because one file in Nix can create a service with a script's contents, create a user, install necessary packages, etc. I think (desktop) Linux is partly a niche market because the management can be very complex. Nix is certainly very complex itself but its structured enough that it can create very simple systems. There are already several NixOS based OS's that are basically just configuration templates. I could certainly see a more user-friendly distro being released using Nix as the foundation. [1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2] https://github.com/divnix/devos https://github.com/divnix/devos