4 ms·

Doubt anyone will be surprised by this from me, but, Nix, 1000x. The amount of crazy stuff you can make work with Nix and Nixpkgs is nuts. This weekend someone

by jchw 2y ago

Doubt anyone will be surprised by this from me, but, Nix, 1000x. The amount of crazy stuff you can make work with Nix and Nixpkgs is nuts. This weekend someone pinged me wanting a static build of a Rust binary that had some gnarly bindings to C++ libraries. In under 100 lines of Nix, we have everything: static musl-based build, dynamic glibc build. Want an AppImage? `nix bundle` with an AppImage bundler. Want an OCI image? dockerTools.buildImage on top of your derivation. Throw it in GitHub actions using the Determinate Nix Installer action and you get automatic caching of the Nix store using GitHub actions cache; pretty useful since neither musl Rust nor static LLVM are cached in Hydra. Want to share your cache? Pipe a list of Nix store paths to Cachix, then they can pull it down, or add the Cachix GitHub action to automatically pull from and/or push to it for the CI build. So if anyone wanted to re-use your cache from GitHub Actions CI runs, they could, provided they trust you. You can even cross-compile with MinGW, or run it on macOS. It's a hugely complex time sink, but my God, it's great. Whereas I don't generally recommend people go down the NixOS rabbit hole unless they're convinced it's right for them, I definitely think Nix is worth having in your toolbelt, it's ridiculously versatile.

xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
This 100%. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
- nicce 2y ago
  You need to give the first gift, however. Time. And lot of it.
renewiltord 2y ago
Wait, this is a pretty good sell. I'm going to give this Nix thing a shot. All the other times it's posted people talk about things I don't care like replicable builds and stuff.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  My guess is that if you use it long enough for it to start being useful, you'll find that "replicable builds" solves a wider variety of problems than you initially thought it did. At that point, the hard part becomes getting your co-workers to recognize that all of these little problems that they perceive as separate are actually just facets of the the same huge nondeterminism problem.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    I'm sure. It's just not a selling point for me right now.
    - pxc 2y ago
      Perhaps that's exactly the problem: 'reproducibility', 'determinism', 'functional'-- these are unfortunately too much 'insider language' to be great sells to most people who aren't already FP or Nix people... even when they're closely related to benefits those prospective newcomers might enjoy! I'm glad you've identified a use case that appeals to you. Have fun!
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
I see tons of people very happily using Nix, but also from what I've seen Nix is one of the most opaque hard to understand inscrutable systems on the planet. The language is impossible to learn, and my limited experience has been that there are extremely few good guides to peering under the covers. Nix is one of the most powerful & well-used bits of modern computing, hugely adopted and loved, but my limited understanding (and what's kept me broadly uninterested) is that it is on the wrong side of the Age of Reason trying to overthrow the Age of Magic war.
- chriswarbo 2y ago
  > The language is impossible to learn, and my limited experience has been that there are extremely few good guides to peering under the covers. Maybe my "Nix from the bottom up" page would help? It peers so far "under the covers" that I only introduce the Nix language very briefly near the end (as a saner alternative to everything else on that page!) http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/bottom_up.html http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/bottom_up.html
- jchw 2y ago
  Honestly, I suspect a lot of what makes it opaque is the fact that it hinges a lot on functional paradigms, this definitely made it a lot harder for me to understand. The trouble is that now that I understand it, I'm not sure how they could architect this in a more scrutable way. This is the problem. I think most of us who use and love Nix understand that it is too complicated, but it's too complicated because none of us can figure out how to make it simpler.
  - infogulch 2y ago
    I'm also nix-curious and intimidated by the wall. I feel like things would be a lot easier to grok if Nix actually had a static type system or even something opt-in instead of "the object has whatever fields I happen to put in it, good luck lol"-typed.
- colordrops 2y ago
  The language is not the hard thing, it's actually straightforward once you get it. It's the crazy amount of convention and the number of layers in the stack that make up the Nix ecosystem that takes so long to grok.
memothon 2y ago
What's the right way to learn how to use NixOS? There are a few different approaches to doing everyday development (oh use Flakes or just make it a default installed package) that it's tedious to do lots of things I've found.
- jchw 2y ago
  I don't think there's a right way to do it, you are correct in that learning NixOS is pretty tedious. Re: flakes, my personal opinion is to use flakes. While Flakes are imperfect, they still provide a lot of functionality that Nix doesn't otherwise have. In my mind, it's like Nix's equivalent of "Go modules" or something like that. I do feel like people who do not like flakes make many valid points (the boilerplate, the fact that the top-level flake expression is a subset of Nix for some reason, etc.) but the argument isn't that those problems shouldn't be solved, it's that flakes are a sub-optimal design. Since they're so proliferated throughout the ecosystem though, it is quite unlikely that Nix or any prominent fork will outright drop flakes support any time in the near future. For better or worse, Flakes are part of the Nix ecosystem for the foreseeable future. In my opinion, one may as well take advantage of that. If you haven't already, I'd get your feet wet with installing Nix on a non-NixOS machine first, and please feel free to ask questions about Nix in the NixOS Discourse "Help" section. I have some recommendations: 1. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv - Since Nix derivations usually wrap around other build systems, the entire derivation is recomputed when any file in it changes; using direnv, you can just get your normal dev tools upon cd'ing into your project directories. This gives you a lot of the benefits of Nix during local development, but with your normal stack, and without needing to globally install anything. Importantly, this works around the problem of needing to rebuild your project every time a file changes; Nix caching isn't granular enough (at least when wrapping around other build systems as it normally does.) 2. If you are trying to build something, chances are you can find inspiration in Nixpkgs. Are you curious how you might package a Bevy game? No problem: literally search "bevy" on the Nixpkgs GitHub repo and see what comes up. I found a derivation that does: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/games/jumpy/default.nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/games/jump... 3. If you use flakes, you should keep the flake "schema" handy. There are a lot of different kinds of flake outputs and there are different ways to specify the same thing, which is somewhat needlessly confusing; keeping the flake schema handy will make it easier to understand what Nix is looking for in a flake, which might make it easier to see what's going on (especially if it's obfuscated.) The most important takeaway here: A command like `nix run flake#attr` will try multiple different attributes. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/flakes#Flake_schema https://nixos.wiki/wiki/flakes#Flake_schema 4. Likewise, I really recommend reading up on what NixOS modules are. NixOS modules are the basis for configurations on NixOS, and having a clear understanding of what is even going on with them is a good idea. For example, you should understand the difference between the Nix language's `import` directive, and using the NixOS modules `imports` attribute to import other NixOS modules. Understanding how the configuration merge works saves a lot of headache, makes it easier to understand how people's configurations works, and also makes it easier to modularize your own NixOS configurations, too. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_modules https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_modules Unfortunately though, there's just no way to make it "click", and I can't guarantee that it's worth all of the effort. For me, I felt it was, but yes, there's no one correct way to do it. But please feel free to ask questions if anything seems confusing.
emporas 2y ago
Nix is one of the reasons open source wins in the long run. I would have never imagined that package dependencies could be installed and managed across programming language boundaries, kernel boundaries, shell boundaries, dotfile boundaries etc. Given that computer complexity grows exponentially all the time, then at some point everyone will be forced to use something like Nix. I agree with the article with Emacs and Unix/Linux.
- fire_lake 2y ago
  Functional Programming approaches usually win in the long run. This is a common thread in the article too, although not explicit.
  - trashburger 2y ago
    I think you mean declarative. Whether something is FP or OP usually doesn't matter too much (unless you go to the extremes of each end of the sprectrum a la AbstractBeanFactory/IO Functor State). Declarative solutions last longer by virtue of their declarativeness; the underlying implementation can evolve as long as the declarative layer is untouched.
    - zarathustreal 2y ago
      Isn’t a class a declaration (of a class type)? Isn’t a function a declaration (of an algorithm)? I’d assert that every programming language is declarative. Especially once you get enough written to constitute a DSL.
      - chriswarbo 2y ago
        I'd say the distinction is more at the semantic level, i.e. denotational vs operational.
      - bubblyworld 2y ago
        I think they mean declarative in the sense that you write down want you _want_ in a solution (prolog/datalog/terraform/etc) without specifying exactly how to compute it (day to day programming languages).
helpfulclippy 2y ago
I had only a dim awareness that Nix was even a thing before a few weeks ago. Then somehow I decided that I needed to commit to it 100% and make NixOS my daily driver and make myself learn this. It's been a lot of fun. Like, Dwarf Fortress kinds of fun. The kind of fun where when I first looked at it I thought it was insane inscrutable nonsense, and now I kind of wonder what happened to me that it's kind of making sense now. The kind of fun where I keep telling myself I just want to make some tiny little thing work, but actually I find excuses to rabbit hole down a bunch of different pathways and find amazingness under every stone. The kind of fun where I know better than to try to count how many hours I've spent on this now. Except unlike Dwarf Fortress, I feel like things are actually improving over time instead of shambling ever-onwards towards an inevitable downfall. So I guess maybe it's more like the kind of fun the very first time I installed Linux and didn't know my way around anything. I'm surprised how much I enjoy customizing things now. I always thought of my desktops sort of like betta fish before -- like, I've taken care of them, but also known better than to get too attached. Eventually the reformat is gonna come, and I'm never gonna set things up QUITE like I had it before. That's definitely not true now. I could start from scratch and be up and running with my entire suite of applications, themes, add-ons and configurations in no time, because it's all just a git repo of nixfiles.
- pxc 2y ago
  > I had only a dim awareness that Nix was even a thing before a few weeks ago. Then somehow I decided that I needed to commit to it 100% and make NixOS my daily driver and make myself learn this. It's been a lot of fun. Like, Dwarf Fortress kinds of fun. The kind of fun where when I first looked at it I thought it was insane inscrutable nonsense, and now I kind of wonder what happened to me that it's kind of making sense now. The kind of fun where I keep telling myself I just want to make some tiny little thing work, but actually I find excuses to rabbit hole down a bunch of different pathways and find amazingness under every stone. The kind of fun where I know better than to try to count how many hours I've spent on this now. That's absolutely what diving in with NixOS was like for me. Wonderful description. :) > I'm surprised how much I enjoy customizing things now. I always thought of my desktops sort of like betta fish before -- like, I've taken care of them, but also known better than to get too attached. Eventually the reformat is gonna come, and I'm never gonna set things up QUITE like I had it before. That's definitely not true now. Yes. NixOS makes customization feel more worth it than other operating systems can! I first heard it expressed best in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-TRCpDizA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-TRCpDizA

by jchw 2y ago

xyzzy_plugh 2y ago

This 100%. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

nicce 2y ago
You need to give the first gift, however. Time. And lot of it.

renewiltord 2y ago

Wait, this is a pretty good sell. I'm going to give this Nix thing a shot. All the other times it's posted people talk about things I don't care like replicable builds and stuff.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
My guess is that if you use it long enough for it to start being useful, you'll find that "replicable builds" solves a wider variety of problems than you initially thought it did. At that point, the hard part becomes getting your co-workers to recognize that all of these little problems that they perceive as separate are actually just facets of the the same huge nondeterminism problem.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  I'm sure. It's just not a selling point for me right now.
  - pxc 2y ago
    Perhaps that's exactly the problem: 'reproducibility', 'determinism', 'functional'-- these are unfortunately too much 'insider language' to be great sells to most people who aren't already FP or Nix people... even when they're closely related to benefits those prospective newcomers might enjoy! I'm glad you've identified a use case that appeals to you. Have fun!

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

I see tons of people very happily using Nix, but also from what I've seen Nix is one of the most opaque hard to understand inscrutable systems on the planet. The language is impossible to learn, and my limited experience has been that there are extremely few good guides to peering under the covers. Nix is one of the most powerful & well-used bits of modern computing, hugely adopted and loved, but my limited understanding (and what's kept me broadly uninterested) is that it is on the wrong side of the Age of Reason trying to overthrow the Age of Magic war.

chriswarbo 2y ago
> The language is impossible to learn, and my limited experience has been that there are extremely few good guides to peering under the covers. Maybe my "Nix from the bottom up" page would help? It peers so far "under the covers" that I only introduce the Nix language very briefly near the end (as a saner alternative to everything else on that page!) http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/bottom_up.html http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/bottom_up.html
jchw 2y ago
Honestly, I suspect a lot of what makes it opaque is the fact that it hinges a lot on functional paradigms, this definitely made it a lot harder for me to understand. The trouble is that now that I understand it, I'm not sure how they could architect this in a more scrutable way. This is the problem. I think most of us who use and love Nix understand that it is too complicated, but it's too complicated because none of us can figure out how to make it simpler.
- infogulch 2y ago
  I'm also nix-curious and intimidated by the wall. I feel like things would be a lot easier to grok if Nix actually had a static type system or even something opt-in instead of "the object has whatever fields I happen to put in it, good luck lol"-typed.
colordrops 2y ago
The language is not the hard thing, it's actually straightforward once you get it. It's the crazy amount of convention and the number of layers in the stack that make up the Nix ecosystem that takes so long to grok.

memothon 2y ago

What's the right way to learn how to use NixOS? There are a few different approaches to doing everyday development (oh use Flakes or just make it a default installed package) that it's tedious to do lots of things I've found.

jchw 2y ago
I don't think there's a right way to do it, you are correct in that learning NixOS is pretty tedious. Re: flakes, my personal opinion is to use flakes. While Flakes are imperfect, they still provide a lot of functionality that Nix doesn't otherwise have. In my mind, it's like Nix's equivalent of "Go modules" or something like that. I do feel like people who do not like flakes make many valid points (the boilerplate, the fact that the top-level flake expression is a subset of Nix for some reason, etc.) but the argument isn't that those problems shouldn't be solved, it's that flakes are a sub-optimal design. Since they're so proliferated throughout the ecosystem though, it is quite unlikely that Nix or any prominent fork will outright drop flakes support any time in the near future. For better or worse, Flakes are part of the Nix ecosystem for the foreseeable future. In my opinion, one may as well take advantage of that. If you haven't already, I'd get your feet wet with installing Nix on a non-NixOS machine first, and please feel free to ask questions about Nix in the NixOS Discourse "Help" section. I have some recommendations: 1. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv - Since Nix derivations usually wrap around other build systems, the entire derivation is recomputed when any file in it changes; using direnv, you can just get your normal dev tools upon cd'ing into your project directories. This gives you a lot of the benefits of Nix during local development, but with your normal stack, and without needing to globally install anything. Importantly, this works around the problem of needing to rebuild your project every time a file changes; Nix caching isn't granular enough (at least when wrapping around other build systems as it normally does.) 2. If you are trying to build something, chances are you can find inspiration in Nixpkgs. Are you curious how you might package a Bevy game? No problem: literally search "bevy" on the Nixpkgs GitHub repo and see what comes up. I found a derivation that does: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/games/jumpy/default.nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/games/jump... 3. If you use flakes, you should keep the flake "schema" handy. There are a lot of different kinds of flake outputs and there are different ways to specify the same thing, which is somewhat needlessly confusing; keeping the flake schema handy will make it easier to understand what Nix is looking for in a flake, which might make it easier to see what's going on (especially if it's obfuscated.) The most important takeaway here: A command like `nix run flake#attr` will try multiple different attributes. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/flakes#Flake_schema https://nixos.wiki/wiki/flakes#Flake_schema 4. Likewise, I really recommend reading up on what NixOS modules are. NixOS modules are the basis for configurations on NixOS, and having a clear understanding of what is even going on with them is a good idea. For example, you should understand the difference between the Nix language's `import` directive, and using the NixOS modules `imports` attribute to import other NixOS modules. Understanding how the configuration merge works saves a lot of headache, makes it easier to understand how people's configurations works, and also makes it easier to modularize your own NixOS configurations, too. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_modules https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_modules Unfortunately though, there's just no way to make it "click", and I can't guarantee that it's worth all of the effort. For me, I felt it was, but yes, there's no one correct way to do it. But please feel free to ask questions if anything seems confusing.

emporas 2y ago

Nix is one of the reasons open source wins in the long run. I would have never imagined that package dependencies could be installed and managed across programming language boundaries, kernel boundaries, shell boundaries, dotfile boundaries etc. Given that computer complexity grows exponentially all the time, then at some point everyone will be forced to use something like Nix. I agree with the article with Emacs and Unix/Linux.

fire_lake 2y ago
Functional Programming approaches usually win in the long run. This is a common thread in the article too, although not explicit.
- trashburger 2y ago
  I think you mean declarative. Whether something is FP or OP usually doesn't matter too much (unless you go to the extremes of each end of the sprectrum a la AbstractBeanFactory/IO Functor State). Declarative solutions last longer by virtue of their declarativeness; the underlying implementation can evolve as long as the declarative layer is untouched.
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    Isn’t a class a declaration (of a class type)? Isn’t a function a declaration (of an algorithm)? I’d assert that every programming language is declarative. Especially once you get enough written to constitute a DSL.
    - chriswarbo 2y ago
      I'd say the distinction is more at the semantic level, i.e. denotational vs operational.
    - bubblyworld 2y ago
      I think they mean declarative in the sense that you write down want you _want_ in a solution (prolog/datalog/terraform/etc) without specifying exactly how to compute it (day to day programming languages).

helpfulclippy 2y ago

I had only a dim awareness that Nix was even a thing before a few weeks ago. Then somehow I decided that I needed to commit to it 100% and make NixOS my daily driver and make myself learn this. It's been a lot of fun. Like, Dwarf Fortress kinds of fun. The kind of fun where when I first looked at it I thought it was insane inscrutable nonsense, and now I kind of wonder what happened to me that it's kind of making sense now. The kind of fun where I keep telling myself I just want to make some tiny little thing work, but actually I find excuses to rabbit hole down a bunch of different pathways and find amazingness under every stone. The kind of fun where I know better than to try to count how many hours I've spent on this now. Except unlike Dwarf Fortress, I feel like things are actually improving over time instead of shambling ever-onwards towards an inevitable downfall. So I guess maybe it's more like the kind of fun the very first time I installed Linux and didn't know my way around anything. I'm surprised how much I enjoy customizing things now. I always thought of my desktops sort of like betta fish before -- like, I've taken care of them, but also known better than to get too attached. Eventually the reformat is gonna come, and I'm never gonna set things up QUITE like I had it before. That's definitely not true now. I could start from scratch and be up and running with my entire suite of applications, themes, add-ons and configurations in no time, because it's all just a git repo of nixfiles.

pxc 2y ago
> I had only a dim awareness that Nix was even a thing before a few weeks ago. Then somehow I decided that I needed to commit to it 100% and make NixOS my daily driver and make myself learn this. It's been a lot of fun. Like, Dwarf Fortress kinds of fun. The kind of fun where when I first looked at it I thought it was insane inscrutable nonsense, and now I kind of wonder what happened to me that it's kind of making sense now. The kind of fun where I keep telling myself I just want to make some tiny little thing work, but actually I find excuses to rabbit hole down a bunch of different pathways and find amazingness under every stone. The kind of fun where I know better than to try to count how many hours I've spent on this now. That's absolutely what diving in with NixOS was like for me. Wonderful description. :) > I'm surprised how much I enjoy customizing things now. I always thought of my desktops sort of like betta fish before -- like, I've taken care of them, but also known better than to get too attached. Eventually the reformat is gonna come, and I'm never gonna set things up QUITE like I had it before. That's definitely not true now. Yes. NixOS makes customization feel more worth it than other operating systems can! I first heard it expressed best in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-TRCpDizA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-TRCpDizA