5 ms·

Switching from Arch to NixOS

40 points by kugurerdem 2y ago

aquova 2y ago
> In the end, I really think Nix and NixOS are very strong tools for achieving reliable and reproducible system configurations and package management. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think the benefits I’ve gotten in this one month of using NixOS so far justified the cost I’ve initially spent and continue to spend learning Nix and NixOS. This largely reflects my experience with NixOS as well. I installed it for a few months on my laptop (on two separate occasions) and there are parts of the OS I love. Being able to simply define your packages and user setup in a single configuration file is incredible, and even now if I wanted to switch back to Nix, I could dig up my configuration.nix and pick up where I left off. Gone too are the piles of mysterious packages installed on my system but I can't recall why they're there or if I still need them. Unfortunately, once you start stepping off the beaten path, Nix often became a source of frustration. If there's a well working package available in its repositories, great. If not I found creating my own Nix packages to be an experience of arcane incantations, even for the simplest things. Compare this to writing Arch AUR PKGBUILDs, which are simple, glorified shell scripts, and it quickly led to me growing frustrated with the OS. I think what eventually did me in was trying to get Neovim LSPs installed correctly. For some reason I never really understood, where ever my Nvim plugin was installing them was certainly not where Nix wanted them, and I never resolved the issue. Things like this eventually drove me back to the comforts of Arch, although every once in a while I look back over and wonder what could've been. I think it's the only distro I've tried in recent years that really tempted me to switch permanently. The ideas of NixOS are fascinating, and I really think it can create a new paradigm in the Linux space. However, I'm unsure whether it'll be Nix itself that really gets there.
- UI_at_80x24 2y ago
  My experiences with NixOS almost exactly mirror yours. I like the concept to a degree but find the implementation flawed. If the project was more cohesive and unified (i.e. OpenBSD); then all the edge cases wouldn't combine to make it less then the sum of it's parts. I love the idea that every configuration could be treated like a cooking recipe. Here's a list of all the ingredients, this is how I want them combined; and poof it's 100% repeatable.
  - alberth 2y ago
    This is describing the broader difference between the BSDs (kernel + userland) vs Linux (only kernel). With that being said, I’d love it if a NixOS like variant came to a BSD.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > With that being said, I’d love it if a NixOS like variant came to a BSD. https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd exists, though I've not tried it
- steinuil 2y ago
  I don't think the benefits of defining your system config in this way are immediately visible after one month. I kind of loathed reinstalling Linux before NixOS because I knew I'd have to spend a lot of time remembering how to reinstall and configure my desktop environment, reconfiguring sshd, fixing font rendering and setting a fallback I liked, reinstalling all my terminal utilities and copying their config files over, setting caps lock to esc, and all those little changes I made to my previous installation that I'd inevitably forgot to record. For servers that's even more relevant: I usually logged into my home raspberry pi every once in a while because I needed to fix something and I didn't even know what services were running on it! With NixOS it's all comparatively simple: I switched my gaming PC to NixOS a few months ago and while I had to reconfigure some things like display settings, everything else just immediately worked exactly the same as on my laptop after installing. I set up nix-darwin on my work macbook and share all my dev environment's configuration with my other computers. Now if I change some Helix settings on the macbook, I just have to commit them to my flake (which is just a git repo) and to get those changes on my desktop as well I just have to pull and rebuild. If I want to install some new service on my home server I just open the relevant configuration.nix file in my config, enable an option, build it locally to check that everything's working, and push the changes to my server. I don't ever feel the need to do a clean reinstall of my system because everything is already as clean as can be, and if I really wanted to it'd just be a matter of backing up /var and /home, putting the nixos installer on a usb stick, and running nixos-rebuild from there. I think the benefits of NixOS come into play months down the line, when a problem comes up and all the specific knowledge about what you did with your setup has faded from memory, but all the operational knowledge on how to use Nix is still there. Edit: I'd recommend trying out NixOS a server or VPS and installing Nix with home-manager on your usual distro for a while. That might give you a taste of what you can do with NixOS without having to fully commit to having it as your main OS and doing everything the "nix way".
  - aquova 2y ago
    I haven't tried Nix on a server, but it has tempted me for the reasons you've described above. I frankly don't recall many of the configuration steps I made ages ago, and having a single configuration to handle the ports and services seems like it could be a great benefit. I'll need to try it out someday, but as you mentioned, I'm not in the habit of reinstalling servers unless I really have to haha.
- LorenzoGood 2y ago
  I eventually figured out how to configure neovim by just using nix to provide the lsp packages: https://github.com/foehammer127/machines/tree/main/users%2Ffoehammer%2Fnvim https://github.com/foehammer127/machines/tree/main/users%2Ff....
rkangel 2y ago
I think there's too much focus on going whole-hog with NixOS, and not enough on just using Nix with home-manager on top of your existing distro. As the sibling comment describes, Nix can get a bit gnarly once you're off the beaten path, and having your whole OS subject to that is a pain. But as an alternative approach I run Fedora, and install key stuff through the OS using dnf in the normal way, but then I have a home-manager config that covers all my key config, and a lot of the extra applications. Yes, I don't get the full "value" of a whole system under version control. But I have a very stable, well proven system with few surprises. And I also have good version control of my config and day to day apps. Plus the extra Nix stuff - if I want to try out a program, or use it temporarily I can just launch a shell with it and it's not cluttering up my system for ever (e.g. when exa was on HN yesterday, I could just do `nix-shell -p exa` to get a shell with exa in it. At some point in the future it'll get garbage collected again).
- IHLayman 2y ago
  I can talk to the opposite side about why I am very happy going all in with NixOS. Prior to that I was running dual-boot Windows (for games) and Ubuntu (for coding). Despite all of the progress made on gaming on Linux, I was still having problems with the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu, sway refused to work, hyprland glitched out, and I was stuck on i3 (because I am a full convert to tiling windows managers). I used home-manager with Nix to manage my dotfiles and had been quite happy with that workflow. As the story goes, Ubuntu had just released 24.04 and I pushed to upgrade. My linux partition was on btrfs. I had been bitten by the snapshots-locking-my-system problem before so I cleared out all my snapshots (and backed up my drive to local NAS). During the update Ubuntu did ANOTHER SNAPSHOT, it took up all the space on device (256GB, yeah I should have had more space) and crashed the system. At that point I was finally done with all of the shenanigans that Ubuntu pulls with apt (not updating everything unless you have their subscription, forcing some installs to go through snapd, separate driver management from apt…), and this last update crashing my system’s boot, even though I could have recovered with my backup, was the last straw. I considered my experience with Ubuntu, and MSFT’s actions to integrate Copilot into the OS, and decided to wipe the entire 1TB drive and go all in with NixOS. I was able to move my home-manager config right over, get my configs all converted to flakes, and get hyprland set up all in less than an hour. Smoothest transition in a long time. I even was able to jump to the 6.8 kernel and things just started working again. I was finally able to play steam games well on my system again. I may even have a path to get my VR to work in Linux again. Are there still problems? Sure. Hyprland is a compromise because sway still won’t cooperate with Nvidia GPUs. But, when I have made changes that get me to a non-bootable state, I can boot to a previous generation directly from GRUB, see what went wrong, fix it, and get back to a good state. Having that ability to recover from a bad boot situation without hacking into a safe mode or GRUB console or rip the drive out and put it into another system was incredibly refreshing. I am not going back anytime soon.
dabber21 2y ago
There are attempts to make create more user friendly Nix bases OSes, I submitted one to hackernews a a while ago: https://snowflakeos.org/ https://snowflakeos.org/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39831027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39831027) But I don't know what the current state of it is as of now
teekert 2y ago
I did the same but opted to install NixOS as primary OS on my work laptop immediately (I came from EndeavourOS). And the experience was actually very smooth. You can install a KDE or Gnome desktop from an iso graphical installer, add your packages to configuration.nix and start being productive. Yes this is the start of a very steep learning curve but I have been taking it very slow and it has been working for me since day 1. I think it’s pretty brilliant that the entry level is so low. Experimentation is cheap (just use grub to boot into your previous env if you mess up, try packages with nix-shell), and I have had great help in the Jupiter Broadcasting Nixnerds Matrix channel. Some great people are in there.
- kugurerdem 2y ago
  Yeah, the experimentation being cheap is one of the reasons why it attracted me as well. The ability to rollback once you mess up things gives such a comfort :)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
madamelic 2y ago
Augh. Sounds like having NPM as an OS. Absolutely no thanks. I'll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing and having to worry about things I didn't before. If, for whatever reason, I need two disparate versions of something I'll figure it out myself rather than abstracting it away. In my mind, this move seems to be moving from 'high potential energy' to 'low potential energy' where you don't have any room to escape; you have locked yourself at the bottom of a pit and you just have to hope things don't roll over the top because you are at the whims of what NixOS has decided. If you were in a 'high potential energy' situation (ie: Basically any other distro), you would have room to fix it yourself or even take your widely compatible dotfiles and move to a different OS. Even if you are allowed to do configuration outside of NixOS as written, I am going to guess that NixOS isn't a huge fan of it and that configuration is fragile. > However, after using NixOS for a while, I realized this was not true. The abstraction that NixOS packages provide doesn’t hide everything from the user to avoid confusion with irrelevant details. Instead, it offers a way to configure your environment the Nix way, so the resulting configuration files are created by Nix. I'd rather beat my head against a wall for a day figuring out how to configure something than get locked into an OS-specific configuration that I can't move elsewhere. Also when you combine it with this: > The documentation is not in great shape. Absolutely no thanks. You are telling me I have to do things the "NixOS way" but also your documentation is bad / inferior? Absolutely no thanks.
- pxc 2y ago
  > ll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing That's not how Nixpkgs works. Nixpkgs, the collection of packages that NixOS is built on top of, is a monorepo with only one version of each end user package. There are only multiple versions of a package in a given commit of Nixpkgs if that is necessary to support some other important tuple of packages because they each have a hard dependency on different versions of some package— just like on your typical Linux distro. The ability to have multiple versions of something installed side-by-side comes into play for your own voluntary customizations, and (optionally) for some third-party package sources. Nix doesn't feature other NPM insanity either— there's no network access at bulld time, no circular dependencies, etc.
peter_d_sherman 2y ago
The greatest feature of NixOS (in my opinion) is the ability to run what are called "ephemeral shells" -- that is, to be able to download and run software in an isolated environment without initially installing it; without it changing or damaging the main environment in any way. This is accomplished via the shell command: '$ nix-shell -p <name of software>'" i.e., $ nix-shell -p vim Where <name of software> can be found from over 100,000 packages (here): https://search.nixos.org/ https://search.nixos.org/ Functionally, the above is the equivalent of what Google Play Store, Apple App Store or Microsoft Store or what other Linux package managers are to their respective platforms... To install software permanently, edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to include the name from above (typically under environment.systemPackages), and follow up with: $ sudo nixos-rebuild switch Also, it's not too difficult to undo those changes should that be wished, but that's beyond the scope of a simple HN post... Anyway, in my opinion, NixOS is probably the most Software Developer friendly evolution of Unix since Linux itself. Well worth a try for technical people -- but there is a learning curve when trying to do very specific esoteric things with it(!)... but that's sort of the case with anything technological... That being said, there's lot more documentation about NixOS on the web these days than there was in the early days... so it may be worth a look!
- kugurerdem 2y ago
  Yeah, nix shells are also worth mentioning. Planning to integrate them into my workflow in the future. :)
jasonriddle 2y ago
I'm of the mindset that NixOS is too much, all at once. I understand the power of the Nix ecosystem, but the barrier of entry remains too high to enter. I've switched to using devenv[1] as a first step. This at least allows me to experiment with using nix to configure my dev environment in a per directory fashion, while allowing me to use the Linux distro of my choice. [1]: https://github.com/cachix/devenv https://github.com/cachix/devenv
- kugurerdem 2y ago
  Seems interesting, thanks for sharing. Will look it up :)

40 points by kugurerdem 2y ago

> In the end, I really think Nix and NixOS are very strong tools for achieving reliable and reproducible system configurations and package management. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think the benefits I’ve gotten in this one month of using NixOS so far justified the cost I’ve initially spent and continue to spend learning Nix and NixOS. This largely reflects my experience with NixOS as well. I installed it for a few months on my laptop (on two separate occasions) and there are parts of the OS I love. Being able to simply define your packages and user setup in a single configuration file is incredible, and even now if I wanted to switch back to Nix, I could dig up my configuration.nix and pick up where I left off. Gone too are the piles of mysterious packages installed on my system but I can't recall why they're there or if I still need them. Unfortunately, once you start stepping off the beaten path, Nix often became a source of frustration. If there's a well working package available in its repositories, great. If not I found creating my own Nix packages to be an experience of arcane incantations, even for the simplest things. Compare this to writing Arch AUR PKGBUILDs, which are simple, glorified shell scripts, and it quickly led to me growing frustrated with the OS. I think what eventually did me in was trying to get Neovim LSPs installed correctly. For some reason I never really understood, where ever my Nvim plugin was installing them was certainly not where Nix wanted them, and I never resolved the issue. Things like this eventually drove me back to the comforts of Arch, although every once in a while I look back over and wonder what could've been. I think it's the only distro I've tried in recent years that really tempted me to switch permanently. The ideas of NixOS are fascinating, and I really think it can create a new paradigm in the Linux space. However, I'm unsure whether it'll be Nix itself that really gets there.

UI_at_80x24 2y ago
My experiences with NixOS almost exactly mirror yours. I like the concept to a degree but find the implementation flawed. If the project was more cohesive and unified (i.e. OpenBSD); then all the edge cases wouldn't combine to make it less then the sum of it's parts. I love the idea that every configuration could be treated like a cooking recipe. Here's a list of all the ingredients, this is how I want them combined; and poof it's 100% repeatable.
- alberth 2y ago
  This is describing the broader difference between the BSDs (kernel + userland) vs Linux (only kernel). With that being said, I’d love it if a NixOS like variant came to a BSD.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > With that being said, I’d love it if a NixOS like variant came to a BSD. https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd exists, though I've not tried it
steinuil 2y ago
I don't think the benefits of defining your system config in this way are immediately visible after one month. I kind of loathed reinstalling Linux before NixOS because I knew I'd have to spend a lot of time remembering how to reinstall and configure my desktop environment, reconfiguring sshd, fixing font rendering and setting a fallback I liked, reinstalling all my terminal utilities and copying their config files over, setting caps lock to esc, and all those little changes I made to my previous installation that I'd inevitably forgot to record. For servers that's even more relevant: I usually logged into my home raspberry pi every once in a while because I needed to fix something and I didn't even know what services were running on it! With NixOS it's all comparatively simple: I switched my gaming PC to NixOS a few months ago and while I had to reconfigure some things like display settings, everything else just immediately worked exactly the same as on my laptop after installing. I set up nix-darwin on my work macbook and share all my dev environment's configuration with my other computers. Now if I change some Helix settings on the macbook, I just have to commit them to my flake (which is just a git repo) and to get those changes on my desktop as well I just have to pull and rebuild. If I want to install some new service on my home server I just open the relevant configuration.nix file in my config, enable an option, build it locally to check that everything's working, and push the changes to my server. I don't ever feel the need to do a clean reinstall of my system because everything is already as clean as can be, and if I really wanted to it'd just be a matter of backing up /var and /home, putting the nixos installer on a usb stick, and running nixos-rebuild from there. I think the benefits of NixOS come into play months down the line, when a problem comes up and all the specific knowledge about what you did with your setup has faded from memory, but all the operational knowledge on how to use Nix is still there. Edit: I'd recommend trying out NixOS a server or VPS and installing Nix with home-manager on your usual distro for a while. That might give you a taste of what you can do with NixOS without having to fully commit to having it as your main OS and doing everything the "nix way".
- aquova 2y ago
  I haven't tried Nix on a server, but it has tempted me for the reasons you've described above. I frankly don't recall many of the configuration steps I made ages ago, and having a single configuration to handle the ports and services seems like it could be a great benefit. I'll need to try it out someday, but as you mentioned, I'm not in the habit of reinstalling servers unless I really have to haha.
LorenzoGood 2y ago
I eventually figured out how to configure neovim by just using nix to provide the lsp packages: https://github.com/foehammer127/machines/tree/main/users%2Ffoehammer%2Fnvim https://github.com/foehammer127/machines/tree/main/users%2Ff....

rkangel 2y ago

I think there's too much focus on going whole-hog with NixOS, and not enough on just using Nix with home-manager on top of your existing distro. As the sibling comment describes, Nix can get a bit gnarly once you're off the beaten path, and having your whole OS subject to that is a pain. But as an alternative approach I run Fedora, and install key stuff through the OS using dnf in the normal way, but then I have a home-manager config that covers all my key config, and a lot of the extra applications. Yes, I don't get the full "value" of a whole system under version control. But I have a very stable, well proven system with few surprises. And I also have good version control of my config and day to day apps. Plus the extra Nix stuff - if I want to try out a program, or use it temporarily I can just launch a shell with it and it's not cluttering up my system for ever (e.g. when exa was on HN yesterday, I could just do `nix-shell -p exa` to get a shell with exa in it. At some point in the future it'll get garbage collected again).

IHLayman 2y ago
I can talk to the opposite side about why I am very happy going all in with NixOS. Prior to that I was running dual-boot Windows (for games) and Ubuntu (for coding). Despite all of the progress made on gaming on Linux, I was still having problems with the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu, sway refused to work, hyprland glitched out, and I was stuck on i3 (because I am a full convert to tiling windows managers). I used home-manager with Nix to manage my dotfiles and had been quite happy with that workflow. As the story goes, Ubuntu had just released 24.04 and I pushed to upgrade. My linux partition was on btrfs. I had been bitten by the snapshots-locking-my-system problem before so I cleared out all my snapshots (and backed up my drive to local NAS). During the update Ubuntu did ANOTHER SNAPSHOT, it took up all the space on device (256GB, yeah I should have had more space) and crashed the system. At that point I was finally done with all of the shenanigans that Ubuntu pulls with apt (not updating everything unless you have their subscription, forcing some installs to go through snapd, separate driver management from apt…), and this last update crashing my system’s boot, even though I could have recovered with my backup, was the last straw. I considered my experience with Ubuntu, and MSFT’s actions to integrate Copilot into the OS, and decided to wipe the entire 1TB drive and go all in with NixOS. I was able to move my home-manager config right over, get my configs all converted to flakes, and get hyprland set up all in less than an hour. Smoothest transition in a long time. I even was able to jump to the 6.8 kernel and things just started working again. I was finally able to play steam games well on my system again. I may even have a path to get my VR to work in Linux again. Are there still problems? Sure. Hyprland is a compromise because sway still won’t cooperate with Nvidia GPUs. But, when I have made changes that get me to a non-bootable state, I can boot to a previous generation directly from GRUB, see what went wrong, fix it, and get back to a good state. Having that ability to recover from a bad boot situation without hacking into a safe mode or GRUB console or rip the drive out and put it into another system was incredibly refreshing. I am not going back anytime soon.

dabber21 2y ago

There are attempts to make create more user friendly Nix bases OSes, I submitted one to hackernews a a while ago: https://snowflakeos.org/ https://snowflakeos.org/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39831027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39831027) But I don't know what the current state of it is as of now

teekert 2y ago

I did the same but opted to install NixOS as primary OS on my work laptop immediately (I came from EndeavourOS). And the experience was actually very smooth. You can install a KDE or Gnome desktop from an iso graphical installer, add your packages to configuration.nix and start being productive. Yes this is the start of a very steep learning curve but I have been taking it very slow and it has been working for me since day 1. I think it’s pretty brilliant that the entry level is so low. Experimentation is cheap (just use grub to boot into your previous env if you mess up, try packages with nix-shell), and I have had great help in the Jupiter Broadcasting Nixnerds Matrix channel. Some great people are in there.

kugurerdem 2y ago
Yeah, the experimentation being cheap is one of the reasons why it attracted me as well. The ability to rollback once you mess up things gives such a comfort :)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

madamelic 2y ago

Augh. Sounds like having NPM as an OS. Absolutely no thanks. I'll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing and having to worry about things I didn't before. If, for whatever reason, I need two disparate versions of something I'll figure it out myself rather than abstracting it away. In my mind, this move seems to be moving from 'high potential energy' to 'low potential energy' where you don't have any room to escape; you have locked yourself at the bottom of a pit and you just have to hope things don't roll over the top because you are at the whims of what NixOS has decided. If you were in a 'high potential energy' situation (ie: Basically any other distro), you would have room to fix it yourself or even take your widely compatible dotfiles and move to a different OS. Even if you are allowed to do configuration outside of NixOS as written, I am going to guess that NixOS isn't a huge fan of it and that configuration is fragile. > However, after using NixOS for a while, I realized this was not true. The abstraction that NixOS packages provide doesn’t hide everything from the user to avoid confusion with irrelevant details. Instead, it offers a way to configure your environment the Nix way, so the resulting configuration files are created by Nix. I'd rather beat my head against a wall for a day figuring out how to configure something than get locked into an OS-specific configuration that I can't move elsewhere. Also when you combine it with this: > The documentation is not in great shape. Absolutely no thanks. You are telling me I have to do things the "NixOS way" but also your documentation is bad / inferior? Absolutely no thanks.

pxc 2y ago
> ll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing That's not how Nixpkgs works. Nixpkgs, the collection of packages that NixOS is built on top of, is a monorepo with only one version of each end user package. There are only multiple versions of a package in a given commit of Nixpkgs if that is necessary to support some other important tuple of packages because they each have a hard dependency on different versions of some package— just like on your typical Linux distro. The ability to have multiple versions of something installed side-by-side comes into play for your own voluntary customizations, and (optionally) for some third-party package sources. Nix doesn't feature other NPM insanity either— there's no network access at bulld time, no circular dependencies, etc.

peter_d_sherman 2y ago

The greatest feature of NixOS (in my opinion) is the ability to run what are called "ephemeral shells" -- that is, to be able to download and run software in an isolated environment without initially installing it; without it changing or damaging the main environment in any way. This is accomplished via the shell command: '$ nix-shell -p <name of software>'" i.e., $ nix-shell -p vim Where <name of software> can be found from over 100,000 packages (here): https://search.nixos.org/ https://search.nixos.org/ Functionally, the above is the equivalent of what Google Play Store, Apple App Store or Microsoft Store or what other Linux package managers are to their respective platforms... To install software permanently, edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to include the name from above (typically under environment.systemPackages), and follow up with: $ sudo nixos-rebuild switch Also, it's not too difficult to undo those changes should that be wished, but that's beyond the scope of a simple HN post... Anyway, in my opinion, NixOS is probably the most Software Developer friendly evolution of Unix since Linux itself. Well worth a try for technical people -- but there is a learning curve when trying to do very specific esoteric things with it(!)... but that's sort of the case with anything technological... That being said, there's lot more documentation about NixOS on the web these days than there was in the early days... so it may be worth a look!

kugurerdem 2y ago
Yeah, nix shells are also worth mentioning. Planning to integrate them into my workflow in the future. :)

jasonriddle 2y ago

I'm of the mindset that NixOS is too much, all at once. I understand the power of the Nix ecosystem, but the barrier of entry remains too high to enter. I've switched to using devenv[1] as a first step. This at least allows me to experiment with using nix to configure my dev environment in a per directory fashion, while allowing me to use the Linux distro of my choice. [1]: https://github.com/cachix/devenv https://github.com/cachix/devenv

kugurerdem 2y ago
Seems interesting, thanks for sharing. Will look it up :)