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There’s a lot of comments in here about desktops, but IMO why even discuss Linux on the desktop… 99.9999% of Linux deployments are not Arch installs on old Thin

There’s a lot of comments in here about desktops, but IMO why even discuss Linux on the desktop… 99.9999% of Linux deployments are not Arch installs on old Thinkpads. Immutable distros *are* becoming a de-facto standard for server deployments, IoT devices, etc. They improve security, enable easy rollbacks, validation of a single non-moving target for systems/hardware developers… There’s also been a ton of very advanced development in the space. You can now take bootable containers and use them to reimage machines and perform upgrades. Extend your operating system using a Dockerfile as you would your app images: https://github.com/containers/bootc https://github.com/containers/bootc

smilliken 2y ago
Every professional programmer needs a desktop OS, and NixOS is really hard to beat. Switching to NixOS is like going from a car that is breaking down all the time to one that's reliable and easy to mod and repair. I don't recommend it to family members, but I do recommend it to programmers that care about their tools. Of course there's many more Linux servers out there than there are programmers, but the OS the programmer uses to develop on is just as important as the OS they deploy to.
- bsder 2y ago
  Nix the idea is fantastic. Nix the implementation is currently a disaster. I liken Nix to source control in the time of CVS. We need two more implementation iterations before its going to be useful to the general public.
  - yoavm 2y ago
    Can you elaborate? Why is it a disaster? I've only used Nix as a package manager when my work distro doesn't have some tools I wanted to install, but the few people I know that use NixOS seem to swear by it.
    - clvx 2y ago
      debugging and error messages are still hard to deal with. Also, flakes should become standard at this point. Documentation on how to load modules and explore modules using nix repl is also lacking and/or frustrating. It definitely has rough edges. I do hope it will improve.
      - ChocolateGod 2y ago
        The CLI is also pretty badly documented, or documentation is outdated.
    - Chris_Newton 2y ago
      For perspective, I’ve been running NixOS on my main workstation going back a few releases now. When it works, it’s great. I like that I can install (and uninstall) much of the software I use declaratively, so I always have a “clean” base system that doesn’t accumulate numerous little packages at strange versions over time in the way that most workstations where software is installed more manually tend to do. This is a trade-off, though. Much is made of the size of the NixOS package repository compared to other distros, but anecdotally I have run into more problems getting a recent version of a popular package installed on my NixOS workstation than I had in probably a decade of running Debian/Ubuntu flavoured distros. If the version of the package you want isn’t available in the NixOS repo, it can be onerous to install it, because by its nature NixOS doesn’t follow some popular Linux conventions like FHS. Typically, you write and maintain your own Nix package, which often ends up similar to fetching a known version of a package from a trusted source and then following the low-level build-from-source process, but all wrapped up in Nix incantations that may or may not be very well documented, and sometimes with a fair bit of detective work to figure out all the versions and hashes of not just the package you want but also all its dependencies, which may in turn need packaging similarly themselves if you’re unlucky. It’s also possible to run into this when you’re not installing whole software applications, including those that are available from the NixOS package repository, but rather things like plug-ins for an application or libraries for a programming language. You might end up needing a custom package for the main application so that its plug-in architecture or build system can find the required dependencies in the expected places when you try to install the extra things. Again, this is all complexity and hassle that just doesn’t happen on mainstream Linux distros. If I install Python and then `pip install somepackage` then 99.9% of the time that just works everywhere else but frequently it won’t work out of the box on NixOS. It’s one of those things that is actually perfectly reasonable given the trade-offs that are explicitly being made, yet still makes NixOS time-consuming and frustrating in a way that other systems simply aren’t when you do run into the limitations. This comment is already way too long, so I’ll just mention as a footnote that NixOS also tries to reconcile two worlds, and not all Linux software is particularly nicely arranged to be managed declaratively. So in practice, you still end up with some things being done more traditionally/imperatively anyway, and then you have a hybrid system that compromises some of the main benefits of the declarative/immutable pattern. There are tools like Flakes and Home Manager that help to overcome some of this as well, and as others have said, they are promising steps in good directions, but we’re not yet realising the full potential of this declarative style and it’s hard to see how we get from here to there quickly.
  - mongol 2y ago
    > ... disaster ... Such an exaggregation. Many thousands of people use it by choice, despite all alternatives. Hardly a disaster, by any definition.
    - nightfly 2y ago
      Many thousands of people is a very small fraction
      - drdaeman 2y ago
        Very few people (among the world population) know what GNU/Linux is. Fewer care enough to switch to it. Even fewer know enough (or have the willpower, time and mental capacity to learn) to actually be proficient. But among those who do, there are plenty of people who have learned Nix well enough it's no longer a weird arcane thingy that spews out incomprehensible errors for them. Although, I guess, among those no one will deny Nix can be better (but there are no multi-billion-dollar corporations spending tons of their resources on it). It's like vim. First time you run it you probably can't even exit it - so, of course you think it's a disaster ;)
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      > exaggregation Is that an aggregation of exaggerations? :p Actually, that portmanteau kinda-works in this context.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - steeleduncan 2y ago
    > I liken Nix to source control in the time of CVS I think this is my favourite comment about Nix ever. I'm not going to stop using Nix until a genuinely better alternative arrives, but that day can't come soon enough
- Thaxll 2y ago
  This is assuming that things break all the time, I've been using Ubuntu / Debian for the last 20 years I never had to re-install it because something broke. Nowdays Linux is very stable, you can have things that don't work properly but you won't need a full re-install.
  - sosodev 2y ago
    Genuine question… how? Every time I’ve tried to run a standard Linux distro like Ubuntu for more than a couple of years I inevitably end up breaking something in a way that I can’t recover. Are you taking snapshots to roll back to?
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      Don't use custom repos, use container technologies (e.g. Flatpak, Docker etc) to install applications, update the system regularly (at least once a week). Usually broken distro upgrades I see are because people run "curl randomdomain.ck/totallysafescript.sh | sudo bash -" to install things or use custom repos.
      - omolobo 2y ago
        In other words, you won't break your system if you keep the system installation pristine.
      - calvinmorrison 2y ago
        container stuff breaks the MOST for me. The hooks into the subsystems invariably are not working correctly be it like xdg preferences or finding things that are global, its nice to package things into their own sandboxes but those sandboxes have not played well with my wider systems. I am still thankful for snap getting me recent copies of popular software on my aged debian installs however.
        ChocolateGod 2y ago
        can't speak for Snap other than the nightmare it is on non-Debian based systems, but not really had any issues with Flatpak.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  That's funny, I've had more errors and disasters with NixOS than I've ever had with Windows or macOS. Repairing it is actually a pain.
  - shatsky 2y ago
    Repairing it is as easy as rebooting and selecting last generation which worked.
    - jokethrowaway 2y ago
      Indeed, that's nice Fixing the issue ends up being rather difficult though
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Until someone from security/hr needs you to install a proprietary package.
  - devops99 2y ago
    Like what? Crowdstrike's EDR?
    - from-nibly 2y ago
      Specific anti virus, fleet management, etc.
- wesapien 2y ago
  My Linux desktop experience has been 2 years of Ubuntu/Debian, 4 years of Fedora and 2 years of NixOS. Hands down, and NixOS is my favorite. It's easy to recover from issues since I've gotten the hang of the build error messages and/or I can just reset my config to the last commit. It took me one year before jumping into flakes and glad I did. Next year, I'm going into Home Manager. A custom GPT have been surprisingly helpful after feeding it manuals for nix, nixpkgs and NixOS and other Linux books.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  I had the opposite experience because I want to run a lot of software in random repos. I can make a nix-shell for each project but then every nix upgrade was forcing me to go through a lengthy reinstall + wrecking compatibility sometimes. Not to mention the amount of derivations I had to write myself just to use latest packages. Using things like virtualenv instead of nix-shell can fix the general instability, but packaging is too big of a problem. I went back to Arch.
  - devops99 2y ago
    > because I want to run a lot of software in random repos. Containers, and snapshots+clones are your friend. For a while I was doing ZFS snapshots and clones of Gentoo userlands. However, if you knew how bad things really are with glibc and how not-well designed Linux is to resist badly behaving software, and how easily some big players can inject badly behaving software into the channels you are fetching from, you would probably seriously consider Qubes. illumos is a kernel you can rely on to run somewhat arbitrary software.
rrix2 2y ago
after all the nixpkgs/nix leadership failures and having dozens of hours of packaging improvement work ignored by individual package maintainers and entire SIGs, I've been evaluating bootc and other declarative options and i'm quite disappointed that they've been completely uninterested in providing any declarative solution for per-host "state" with bootc systems -- having to set up a boot Dockerfile (sorry daddy shadowman i meant Containerfile!!!) and then also use Ansible and/or cloud-init on top of that to set up a new host is just a complete non-starter when NixOS can handle both in one language framework and development environment even if that framework is heterodox jank that everyone outside of nixpkgs resents.
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
> 99.9999% of Linux deployments are not Arch installs on old Thinkpads. Yes, but a majority of the remaining 0.0001% are people on Hacker News, so it's going to get discussed here!
devops99 2y ago
I personally know someone who runs an "endpoint as a service" with full MDM configurable via web-ui ; the endpoints (the laptops) run on a Linux kernel.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
> Immutable distros are becoming a de-facto standard for server deployments What? No they're not. I literally have never once in my career seen a server deployed with an immutable distro.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  That's probably because they are practically most used for the underlying OS of a Kubernetes host (seeing as how it is difficult by definition to configure an immutable install). If you really think about it, what's the difference between spinning up a VM with a preconfigured image and spinning up a VM with an _immutable_ preconfigured image?
  - ilbeeper 2y ago
    The difference is that one is immutable and the other is not. One can be rolled back to earlier version while retaining user data and the other doesn't offer that ability.
    - SR2Z 2y ago
      Sure, but the GKE autoscaler will happily erase and recreate machines whenever it wants. Divergences from the base image are inherently limited because of that.
      - ilbeeper 2y ago
        Despite the name, that's not what immutable distros are for. GKE won't let yet restore previous generation of configured and component versioned base image.
- ghshephard 2y ago
  Plus 1 on this - I've probably had direct responsibility for managing fleets of roughly 50,000 linux hosts - never seen an immutable distro. We usually just burn a fresh image of whatever mainline ubuntu is offering every week or two into the fleet. Saying that containers are becoming a defacto standard is reasonable though - pretty much every company I've worked with and my coworkers have worked with have shifted everything into containers (at least in companies with x00k microservice instances running on ~100k machine environments).

smilliken 2y ago

Every professional programmer needs a desktop OS, and NixOS is really hard to beat. Switching to NixOS is like going from a car that is breaking down all the time to one that's reliable and easy to mod and repair. I don't recommend it to family members, but I do recommend it to programmers that care about their tools. Of course there's many more Linux servers out there than there are programmers, but the OS the programmer uses to develop on is just as important as the OS they deploy to.

bsder 2y ago
Nix the idea is fantastic. Nix the implementation is currently a disaster. I liken Nix to source control in the time of CVS. We need two more implementation iterations before its going to be useful to the general public.
- yoavm 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? Why is it a disaster? I've only used Nix as a package manager when my work distro doesn't have some tools I wanted to install, but the few people I know that use NixOS seem to swear by it.
  - clvx 2y ago
    debugging and error messages are still hard to deal with. Also, flakes should become standard at this point. Documentation on how to load modules and explore modules using nix repl is also lacking and/or frustrating. It definitely has rough edges. I do hope it will improve.
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      The CLI is also pretty badly documented, or documentation is outdated.
  - Chris_Newton 2y ago
    For perspective, I’ve been running NixOS on my main workstation going back a few releases now. When it works, it’s great. I like that I can install (and uninstall) much of the software I use declaratively, so I always have a “clean” base system that doesn’t accumulate numerous little packages at strange versions over time in the way that most workstations where software is installed more manually tend to do. This is a trade-off, though. Much is made of the size of the NixOS package repository compared to other distros, but anecdotally I have run into more problems getting a recent version of a popular package installed on my NixOS workstation than I had in probably a decade of running Debian/Ubuntu flavoured distros. If the version of the package you want isn’t available in the NixOS repo, it can be onerous to install it, because by its nature NixOS doesn’t follow some popular Linux conventions like FHS. Typically, you write and maintain your own Nix package, which often ends up similar to fetching a known version of a package from a trusted source and then following the low-level build-from-source process, but all wrapped up in Nix incantations that may or may not be very well documented, and sometimes with a fair bit of detective work to figure out all the versions and hashes of not just the package you want but also all its dependencies, which may in turn need packaging similarly themselves if you’re unlucky. It’s also possible to run into this when you’re not installing whole software applications, including those that are available from the NixOS package repository, but rather things like plug-ins for an application or libraries for a programming language. You might end up needing a custom package for the main application so that its plug-in architecture or build system can find the required dependencies in the expected places when you try to install the extra things. Again, this is all complexity and hassle that just doesn’t happen on mainstream Linux distros. If I install Python and then `pip install somepackage` then 99.9% of the time that just works everywhere else but frequently it won’t work out of the box on NixOS. It’s one of those things that is actually perfectly reasonable given the trade-offs that are explicitly being made, yet still makes NixOS time-consuming and frustrating in a way that other systems simply aren’t when you do run into the limitations. This comment is already way too long, so I’ll just mention as a footnote that NixOS also tries to reconcile two worlds, and not all Linux software is particularly nicely arranged to be managed declaratively. So in practice, you still end up with some things being done more traditionally/imperatively anyway, and then you have a hybrid system that compromises some of the main benefits of the declarative/immutable pattern. There are tools like Flakes and Home Manager that help to overcome some of this as well, and as others have said, they are promising steps in good directions, but we’re not yet realising the full potential of this declarative style and it’s hard to see how we get from here to there quickly.
- mongol 2y ago
  > ... disaster ... Such an exaggregation. Many thousands of people use it by choice, despite all alternatives. Hardly a disaster, by any definition.
  - nightfly 2y ago
    Many thousands of people is a very small fraction
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      Very few people (among the world population) know what GNU/Linux is. Fewer care enough to switch to it. Even fewer know enough (or have the willpower, time and mental capacity to learn) to actually be proficient. But among those who do, there are plenty of people who have learned Nix well enough it's no longer a weird arcane thingy that spews out incomprehensible errors for them. Although, I guess, among those no one will deny Nix can be better (but there are no multi-billion-dollar corporations spending tons of their resources on it). It's like vim. First time you run it you probably can't even exit it - so, of course you think it's a disaster ;)
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > exaggregation Is that an aggregation of exaggerations? :p Actually, that portmanteau kinda-works in this context.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- steeleduncan 2y ago
  > I liken Nix to source control in the time of CVS I think this is my favourite comment about Nix ever. I'm not going to stop using Nix until a genuinely better alternative arrives, but that day can't come soon enough
Thaxll 2y ago
This is assuming that things break all the time, I've been using Ubuntu / Debian for the last 20 years I never had to re-install it because something broke. Nowdays Linux is very stable, you can have things that don't work properly but you won't need a full re-install.
- sosodev 2y ago
  Genuine question… how? Every time I’ve tried to run a standard Linux distro like Ubuntu for more than a couple of years I inevitably end up breaking something in a way that I can’t recover. Are you taking snapshots to roll back to?
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    Don't use custom repos, use container technologies (e.g. Flatpak, Docker etc) to install applications, update the system regularly (at least once a week). Usually broken distro upgrades I see are because people run "curl randomdomain.ck/totallysafescript.sh | sudo bash -" to install things or use custom repos.
    - omolobo 2y ago
      In other words, you won't break your system if you keep the system installation pristine.
    - calvinmorrison 2y ago
      container stuff breaks the MOST for me. The hooks into the subsystems invariably are not working correctly be it like xdg preferences or finding things that are global, its nice to package things into their own sandboxes but those sandboxes have not played well with my wider systems. I am still thankful for snap getting me recent copies of popular software on my aged debian installs however.
      - ChocolateGod 2y ago
        can't speak for Snap other than the nightmare it is on non-Debian based systems, but not really had any issues with Flatpak.
satvikpendem 2y ago
That's funny, I've had more errors and disasters with NixOS than I've ever had with Windows or macOS. Repairing it is actually a pain.
- shatsky 2y ago
  Repairing it is as easy as rebooting and selecting last generation which worked.
  - jokethrowaway 2y ago
    Indeed, that's nice Fixing the issue ends up being rather difficult though
from-nibly 2y ago
Until someone from security/hr needs you to install a proprietary package.
- devops99 2y ago
  Like what? Crowdstrike's EDR?
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Specific anti virus, fleet management, etc.
wesapien 2y ago
My Linux desktop experience has been 2 years of Ubuntu/Debian, 4 years of Fedora and 2 years of NixOS. Hands down, and NixOS is my favorite. It's easy to recover from issues since I've gotten the hang of the build error messages and/or I can just reset my config to the last commit. It took me one year before jumping into flakes and glad I did. Next year, I'm going into Home Manager. A custom GPT have been surprisingly helpful after feeding it manuals for nix, nixpkgs and NixOS and other Linux books.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
I had the opposite experience because I want to run a lot of software in random repos. I can make a nix-shell for each project but then every nix upgrade was forcing me to go through a lengthy reinstall + wrecking compatibility sometimes. Not to mention the amount of derivations I had to write myself just to use latest packages. Using things like virtualenv instead of nix-shell can fix the general instability, but packaging is too big of a problem. I went back to Arch.
- devops99 2y ago
  > because I want to run a lot of software in random repos. Containers, and snapshots+clones are your friend. For a while I was doing ZFS snapshots and clones of Gentoo userlands. However, if you knew how bad things really are with glibc and how not-well designed Linux is to resist badly behaving software, and how easily some big players can inject badly behaving software into the channels you are fetching from, you would probably seriously consider Qubes. illumos is a kernel you can rely on to run somewhat arbitrary software.

rrix2 2y ago

after all the nixpkgs/nix leadership failures and having dozens of hours of packaging improvement work ignored by individual package maintainers and entire SIGs, I've been evaluating bootc and other declarative options and i'm quite disappointed that they've been completely uninterested in providing any declarative solution for per-host "state" with bootc systems -- having to set up a boot Dockerfile (sorry daddy shadowman i meant Containerfile!!!) and then also use Ansible and/or cloud-init on top of that to set up a new host is just a complete non-starter when NixOS can handle both in one language framework and development environment even if that framework is heterodox jank that everyone outside of nixpkgs resents.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

> 99.9999% of Linux deployments are not Arch installs on old Thinkpads. Yes, but a majority of the remaining 0.0001% are people on Hacker News, so it's going to get discussed here!

devops99 2y ago

I personally know someone who runs an "endpoint as a service" with full MDM configurable via web-ui ; the endpoints (the laptops) run on a Linux kernel.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

> Immutable distros are becoming a de-facto standard for server deployments What? No they're not. I literally have never once in my career seen a server deployed with an immutable distro.

SR2Z 2y ago
That's probably because they are practically most used for the underlying OS of a Kubernetes host (seeing as how it is difficult by definition to configure an immutable install). If you really think about it, what's the difference between spinning up a VM with a preconfigured image and spinning up a VM with an _immutable_ preconfigured image?
- ilbeeper 2y ago
  The difference is that one is immutable and the other is not. One can be rolled back to earlier version while retaining user data and the other doesn't offer that ability.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    Sure, but the GKE autoscaler will happily erase and recreate machines whenever it wants. Divergences from the base image are inherently limited because of that.
    - ilbeeper 2y ago
      Despite the name, that's not what immutable distros are for. GKE won't let yet restore previous generation of configured and component versioned base image.
ghshephard 2y ago
Plus 1 on this - I've probably had direct responsibility for managing fleets of roughly 50,000 linux hosts - never seen an immutable distro. We usually just burn a fresh image of whatever mainline ubuntu is offering every week or two into the fleet. Saying that containers are becoming a defacto standard is reasonable though - pretty much every company I've worked with and my coworkers have worked with have shifted everything into containers (at least in companies with x00k microservice instances running on ~100k machine environments).