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Switched to nixOS long ago. Haven’t looked back. Use windows in VM for occasional gaming.

by xyst 3y ago

tombert 3y ago
Nixos kind of bothers me, not for anything that it did wrong, but for the fact that it’s so obviously the “correct” way of doing things to me that it’s annoying that it’s not the default in every system. Its declarative nature is so much easier to work with, and doing the tmpfs as root trick makes it more fun to experiment with the knowledge that you won’t break anything that can’t be fixed with a reboot. I would really like to get my T9 MacBook on Nixos but I have had a lot of issues when I attempted that, and suspend is still broken.
- genewitch 3y ago
  I tried using nix maybe 8 or 9 years ago (and further back if memory serves) and i was going to make question mark faces at you, but i asked chatgpt how to install and use firefox on nix and it's `nix-env -iA nixos.firefox` which strikes me as... fine? It confuses me because how is that different or better than pacman -S or apt install or emerge -va? Especially portage?!
  - tombert 3y ago
    That particular command isn’t really different than pacman or apt. Most of the time, though, with Nix, you don’t install stuff that way. In Nixos, there’s a configuration.nix file, and you add the package you want to to that file (along with all the other system configs). Then you effectively “rebuild” the OS based on that configuration, and a snapshot is created. Since this configuration is just text, it can be version controlled and backed up to GitHub or something. If your hard drive crashes or something, you can reinstall Nixos from the config in like fifteen minutes. If you just need the program temporarily, you can do “nix-shell -p neovim”, which will create a temporary shell where neon can be executed. Once you exit the shell, the binary is unlinked and will be eventually garbage collected. There’s more, but the tl;dr is that can make stuff a lot more declarative while also allowing for stuff to be more ephemeral.

Switched to nixOS long ago. Haven’t looked back. Use windows in VM for occasional gaming.

by xyst 3y ago

Switched to nixOS long ago. Haven’t looked back. Use windows in VM for occasional gaming.

Nixos kind of bothers me, not for anything that it did wrong, but for the fact that it’s so obviously the “correct” way of doing things to me that it’s annoying that it’s not the default in every system. Its declarative nature is so much easier to work with, and doing the tmpfs as root trick makes it more fun to experiment with the knowledge that you won’t break anything that can’t be fixed with a reboot. I would really like to get my T9 MacBook on Nixos but I have had a lot of issues when I attempted that, and suspend is still broken.

genewitch 3y ago
I tried using nix maybe 8 or 9 years ago (and further back if memory serves) and i was going to make question mark faces at you, but i asked chatgpt how to install and use firefox on nix and it's `nix-env -iA nixos.firefox` which strikes me as... fine? It confuses me because how is that different or better than pacman -S or apt install or emerge -va? Especially portage?!
- tombert 3y ago
  That particular command isn’t really different than pacman or apt. Most of the time, though, with Nix, you don’t install stuff that way. In Nixos, there’s a configuration.nix file, and you add the package you want to to that file (along with all the other system configs). Then you effectively “rebuild” the OS based on that configuration, and a snapshot is created. Since this configuration is just text, it can be version controlled and backed up to GitHub or something. If your hard drive crashes or something, you can reinstall Nixos from the config in like fifteen minutes. If you just need the program temporarily, you can do “nix-shell -p neovim”, which will create a temporary shell where neon can be executed. Once you exit the shell, the binary is unlinked and will be eventually garbage collected. There’s more, but the tl;dr is that can make stuff a lot more declarative while also allowing for stuff to be more ephemeral.