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Thank you for your comment velcrovan, but I don't agree with this sentiment. I've been using Ubuntu for personal laptop for a decade, and whatever for a given c

Thank you for your comment velcrovan, but I don't agree with this sentiment. I've been using Ubuntu for personal laptop for a decade, and whatever for a given corporate laptop, and was reluctant to dig into NixOS, until it clicked - the point is to have it done once, and you won't have to do it ever again! NixOS is the only one that allows so.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
> the point is to have it done once, and you won't have to do it ever again! NixOS is the only one that allows so. Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". Been there, done that.
- Ericson2314 3y ago
  When you upgrade NixOS there are always warnings on anything deprecated telling you what to do.
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    I guessed so. So it’s not at all done once, never done again as the OP suggested but rather done once, now keep redoing something slightly different every fortnight and enjoy your constantly half-broken system. In a way, it’s reassuring to see that niche Linux distributions have changed so little in the decade since I last used one.
    - mksybr 3y ago
      this is presumably why guix calls itself "an advanced packaging management system". if you don't want to futz around with that kind of thing theres always ubuntu which mostly just works and even comes prebaked with activedirectory support so you can argue with your IT department about it :)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > now keep redoing something slightly different every fortnight and enjoy your constantly half-broken system. Yeah, if any of that is even remotely true then something is horribly wrong with your system.
    - Ericson2314 3y ago
      I only yet this once every 6 months. And the issues are resolved in minutes following the printed instructions (as opposed to crawling through arch wiki or whatever). Most of the time the deprecations require no action on my part, I simply rather keep things tidy and make the warnings go away. > In a way, it’s reassuring to see that niche Linux distributions have changed so little in the decade since I last used one. You are misunderstanding what I am saying. The situation is very different. There are still Linux/Wayland/NVidia/Whatever issues, but configuring NixOS is not among them.
      - pxc 3y ago
        > Most of the time the deprecations require no action on my part, I simply rather keep things tidy and make the warnings go away. Here to confirm that you can usually ignore those warnings for a year or more, hahaha.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      What exactly is the point of this comment? You haven’t even tried the distro, was assumed something wrongly, and then double down on it?
- angio 3y ago
  In that case NixOS rebuild will fail telling you exactly what to do. This is better than upgrading MacOS, where a system upgrade may break tools installed with homebrew and there is no way of knowing until _after_ the upgrade.
- rgoulter 3y ago
  > Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". For those not familiar: Nix tooling introduced flakes. The community generally likes this feature since it provides a couple of significant improvements on how nix gets used. There was a breaking change between 2.3 and 2.4 for even the non-flake code; but, that was partly because 2.4 was a huge release. (2.3 released in 2019/09; 2.4 in 2021/11). Releases since then have been smaller and more frequent.
mksybr 3y ago
I don't think NixOS is the only distro that has this property, what prevents someone from making a shell script that installs your applications and dotfiles? Blow away your OS install and get your set up back in one line is my experience and I don't run Nix or Guix for most of my applications
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  > what prevents someone from making a shell script that installs your applications and dotfiles The reproducibility of that would not be nearly as high. For example, if the source of those applications is apt the versions of packages would change over time.
  - mksybr 3y ago
    yes, i am fine with that personally and its hard for me to grok what benefits reproducibility in the guix sense would get me here
    - rgoulter 3y ago
      One example was "I want to run an old version of Hugo". In the time since running the old version of hugo, enough about the system had changed: - The OS had changed significantly (so re-running an old build didn't work). - The compiler had changed significantly (so compiling from source would have been difficult). https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/
      - mksybr 3y ago
        Great example! Managing old or multiple versions of software is actually a great usecase for Guix.
    - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
      > i am fine with that personally and its hard for me to grok what benefits reproducibility in the guix sense would get me here I read this as: > i am fine with the lack of reproducibility of apt-update personally and its hard for me to grok what benefits reproducibility in the guix sense would get me here To which my answer is: Guix gets you the reproducibility benefit of not having the reproducibility harming apt-update. Does this help answer your question or confuse things more?
jt2190 3y ago
> … I don't agree with this sentiment. Not the parent poster… I’m unclear what sentiment you’re disagreeing with: Are you inferring that velcrovan is against tinkering with niche distros?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I read it that way; it reads as "have fun playing with your broken, useless, toy OS". Traditionally followed by some comment about how they use a Real OS for Serious Work that definitely never breaks (conveniently skipping over the ways it breaks that they have to deal with).
  - velcrovan 3y ago
    Sorry, I should have included a /nosarcasm tag or something, that is definitely not how I meant it. I still enjoy the level of sleuthing and tinkering shown in the original linked post, I just choose to spend my time/energy budget on other kinds of challenges, rather than on my personal machine’s operating system. If I had the level of free time I had in my twenties I’m sure I would still be on Linux.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Okay, that does help to know. It's a weird position IMO (you really spend less time/energy on another OS's quirks?), but it's nice to know that it wasn't intended condescendingly.
xyproto 3y ago
Then the protocol changes from X to Wayland, python changes from 2 to 3, gtk changes from 2 to 4 and systemd replaces core services...
- pxc 3y ago
  NixOS actually navigated a change from OpenRC to systemd many years ago. You didn't generally have to change your service configurations because NixOS puts a bit of abstraction between you and the service management system.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  You don't actually have to switch to Wayland, you can keep using X like for the last couple decades. The python change was annoying, but it took like a decade and I'm not sure it was actually user impacting; most distros switched packages over invisibly. Same for GTK and systemd; they were annoying for tinkerers and maintainers, but would an end user actually notice?
  - xyproto 3y ago
    End users can stay at old versions and old distros for as long as they like. Most users can benefit from security updates, though. They might also (maybe) get better performance, new features and a smoother user experience.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Okay? That has very little to do with anything I wrote. Xorg is maintained, python2 was maintained for a long time into 3's lifecycle, and GTK and systemd shouldn't have broken anything for users. None of this requires foregoing updates.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago

> the point is to have it done once, and you won't have to do it ever again! NixOS is the only one that allows so. Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". Been there, done that.

Ericson2314 3y ago
When you upgrade NixOS there are always warnings on anything deprecated telling you what to do.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  I guessed so. So it’s not at all done once, never done again as the OP suggested but rather done once, now keep redoing something slightly different every fortnight and enjoy your constantly half-broken system. In a way, it’s reassuring to see that niche Linux distributions have changed so little in the decade since I last used one.
  - mksybr 3y ago
    this is presumably why guix calls itself "an advanced packaging management system". if you don't want to futz around with that kind of thing theres always ubuntu which mostly just works and even comes prebaked with activedirectory support so you can argue with your IT department about it :)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > now keep redoing something slightly different every fortnight and enjoy your constantly half-broken system. Yeah, if any of that is even remotely true then something is horribly wrong with your system.
  - Ericson2314 3y ago
    I only yet this once every 6 months. And the issues are resolved in minutes following the printed instructions (as opposed to crawling through arch wiki or whatever). Most of the time the deprecations require no action on my part, I simply rather keep things tidy and make the warnings go away. > In a way, it’s reassuring to see that niche Linux distributions have changed so little in the decade since I last used one. You are misunderstanding what I am saying. The situation is very different. There are still Linux/Wayland/NVidia/Whatever issues, but configuring NixOS is not among them.
    - pxc 3y ago
      > Most of the time the deprecations require no action on my part, I simply rather keep things tidy and make the warnings go away. Here to confirm that you can usually ignore those warnings for a year or more, hahaha.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    What exactly is the point of this comment? You haven’t even tried the distro, was assumed something wrongly, and then double down on it?
angio 3y ago
In that case NixOS rebuild will fail telling you exactly what to do. This is better than upgrading MacOS, where a system upgrade may break tools installed with homebrew and there is no way of knowing until _after_ the upgrade.
rgoulter 3y ago
> Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". For those not familiar: Nix tooling introduced flakes. The community generally likes this feature since it provides a couple of significant improvements on how nix gets used. There was a breaking change between 2.3 and 2.4 for even the non-flake code; but, that was partly because 2.4 was a huge release. (2.3 released in 2019/09; 2.4 in 2021/11). Releases since then have been smaller and more frequent.

mksybr 3y ago

I don't think NixOS is the only distro that has this property, what prevents someone from making a shell script that installs your applications and dotfiles? Blow away your OS install and get your set up back in one line is my experience and I don't run Nix or Guix for most of my applications

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> what prevents someone from making a shell script that installs your applications and dotfiles The reproducibility of that would not be nearly as high. For example, if the source of those applications is apt the versions of packages would change over time.
- mksybr 3y ago
  yes, i am fine with that personally and its hard for me to grok what benefits reproducibility in the guix sense would get me here
  - rgoulter 3y ago
    One example was "I want to run an old version of Hugo". In the time since running the old version of hugo, enough about the system had changed: - The OS had changed significantly (so re-running an old build didn't work). - The compiler had changed significantly (so compiling from source would have been difficult). https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/
    - mksybr 3y ago
      Great example! Managing old or multiple versions of software is actually a great usecase for Guix.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    > i am fine with that personally and its hard for me to grok what benefits reproducibility in the guix sense would get me here I read this as: > i am fine with the lack of reproducibility of apt-update personally and its hard for me to grok what benefits reproducibility in the guix sense would get me here To which my answer is: Guix gets you the reproducibility benefit of not having the reproducibility harming apt-update. Does this help answer your question or confuse things more?

jt2190 3y ago

> … I don't agree with this sentiment. Not the parent poster… I’m unclear what sentiment you’re disagreeing with: Are you inferring that velcrovan is against tinkering with niche distros?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I read it that way; it reads as "have fun playing with your broken, useless, toy OS". Traditionally followed by some comment about how they use a Real OS for Serious Work that definitely never breaks (conveniently skipping over the ways it breaks that they have to deal with).
- velcrovan 3y ago
  Sorry, I should have included a /nosarcasm tag or something, that is definitely not how I meant it. I still enjoy the level of sleuthing and tinkering shown in the original linked post, I just choose to spend my time/energy budget on other kinds of challenges, rather than on my personal machine’s operating system. If I had the level of free time I had in my twenties I’m sure I would still be on Linux.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Okay, that does help to know. It's a weird position IMO (you really spend less time/energy on another OS's quirks?), but it's nice to know that it wasn't intended condescendingly.

xyproto 3y ago

Then the protocol changes from X to Wayland, python changes from 2 to 3, gtk changes from 2 to 4 and systemd replaces core services...

pxc 3y ago
NixOS actually navigated a change from OpenRC to systemd many years ago. You didn't generally have to change your service configurations because NixOS puts a bit of abstraction between you and the service management system.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
You don't actually have to switch to Wayland, you can keep using X like for the last couple decades. The python change was annoying, but it took like a decade and I'm not sure it was actually user impacting; most distros switched packages over invisibly. Same for GTK and systemd; they were annoying for tinkerers and maintainers, but would an end user actually notice?
- xyproto 3y ago
  End users can stay at old versions and old distros for as long as they like. Most users can benefit from security updates, though. They might also (maybe) get better performance, new features and a smoother user experience.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Okay? That has very little to do with anything I wrote. Xorg is maintained, python2 was maintained for a long time into 3's lifecycle, and GTK and systemd shouldn't have broken anything for users. None of this requires foregoing updates.