2 ms·

This person's main argument is that because Ansible can be used to accomplish some of the benefits (for some definition of accomplish) of NixOS, that NixOS isn'

This person's main argument is that because Ansible can be used to accomplish some of the benefits (for some definition of accomplish) of NixOS, that NixOS isn't doing anything special or differentiating. I also get a sense they are for some reason solely focused on cattle server use-cases. I'd say the OP (home infra) is in between your production servers and your PC.

sgarland 4y ago
I run my home infra as sort-of-cattle. Nothing that matters is stored solely on local disk. If my Mac were to die, I'd probably spend an hour or so waiting for Homebrew and asdf to install stuff, and I'd have to manually grab some files from GitHub. The worst case would be my Windows desktop dying, since I have nothing in the way of repeatability set up for, but all I use it for is Steam. Again, mostly just dealing with the annoyance of installing Windows and waiting for Steam to re-download a ton of games. Conversely, I can lose a k8s node and have nothing change. If I lose my NAS (separate node, separate Proxmox cluster), I'd have to boot up the backup (which boots daily to sync, then shuts down) and run an Ansible play to change its IP address so that all the NFS targets still worked. I could make that more automated, I suppose, but it's an unlikely scenario so I'm fine with the small amount of manual labor. I guess my point is that I don't see the benefit in having a special OS for daily use. If I want to fiddle around and possibly break things, I don't want to be doing that on the device I use daily. I used Gentoo for years in the early 2000s, and no longer have the time or patience for my main computer breaking constantly. If I want to play with something, I spin up a VM. If I want to play with something baremetal, I have an old Dell T310 I can use, and a couple of ancient Macbooks somewhere.

2 ms·

This person's main argument is that because Ansible can be used to accomplish some of the benefits (for some definition of accomplish) of NixOS, that NixOS isn'

by whateveracct 4y ago

sgarland 4y ago
I run my home infra as sort-of-cattle. Nothing that matters is stored solely on local disk. If my Mac were to die, I'd probably spend an hour or so waiting for Homebrew and asdf to install stuff, and I'd have to manually grab some files from GitHub. The worst case would be my Windows desktop dying, since I have nothing in the way of repeatability set up for, but all I use it for is Steam. Again, mostly just dealing with the annoyance of installing Windows and waiting for Steam to re-download a ton of games. Conversely, I can lose a k8s node and have nothing change. If I lose my NAS (separate node, separate Proxmox cluster), I'd have to boot up the backup (which boots daily to sync, then shuts down) and run an Ansible play to change its IP address so that all the NFS targets still worked. I could make that more automated, I suppose, but it's an unlikely scenario so I'm fine with the small amount of manual labor. I guess my point is that I don't see the benefit in having a special OS for daily use. If I want to fiddle around and possibly break things, I don't want to be doing that on the device I use daily. I used Gentoo for years in the early 2000s, and no longer have the time or patience for my main computer breaking constantly. If I want to play with something, I spin up a VM. If I want to play with something baremetal, I have an old Dell T310 I can use, and a couple of ancient Macbooks somewhere.