5 ms·

I'd love NixOS more if they had any decent documentation. Everything seems scattered around a dozen forums, a hundred old blog posts, and a thousand issues of

• exe34 7mo ago
  ChatGPT is very good at pulling it together to give you working code. Not on the first try, but on the third try it usually works.
  • moonlion_eth 7mo ago
    my entire system is configured using a flake i built with coding agent and skills to tell it how to configure things in nixos heh
  • qiine 7mo ago
    Pasting the generally horrible error messages is also quite effective!
    • fragmede 7mo ago
      Pasting? Give Claude/codex the ability to go fix it itself and have it deal with it directly.
      • exe34 7mo ago
        no thank you, there are things I do not want Claude to have rwx on. like my entire f*cking system. I run llms in a docker container with just the folder I'm working in.
        • CyberShadow 7mo ago
          If you grant access to the Nix daemon socket but not writing outside the current directory, that's an effective sandbox. It allows evaluating derivations but not actually installing them.
      • qiine 7mo ago
        haha technologie is moving so fast ;p
• hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  A lot of us use NixOS/nix yet haven't read any documentation nor hand-written nix ourself. That's Claude Code's job.
  • drdaeman 7mo ago
    If only. Claude Code has to be actively steered, because while it knows some nixpkgs it surely doesn’t know it enough. E.g. it was absolutely incapable of fixing lldap settings after system upgrade from 25.05 to 25.11. It just prodded around blindly, producing meaningless configs instead learning how the module works. NixOS docs work for me, but I tend to just go for the nixpkgs source instead. Manuals document options but not how those are actually plumbed through, nor what remains behind the scenes like all systemd unit settings). Claude can do this too, but it goes quite weird roundabout ways with a lot of weird `find /nix/store` and `nix eval`s to get to it, slow and token-hungry (and not always accurate). This said, Claude is very helpful at checking logs and providing a picture of what’s going on - saves ton of time this way. Plus it can speed up iterating on changes after it’s fed enough knowledge (but don’t expect it to do things right, that’s still on you). It has breadth of it, but not the depth, and that shows at almost any non-trivial task.
    • hombre_fatal 7mo ago
      You don't have Claude Code git clone nixpkgs and home-manager for local reference? I feel you on the nix store + nix eval death loop, though it gleans real info. If I weren't on the Claude Max plan I'd probably feel more of the pain. And context is now 1MM tokens which means you're not running out just as it's starting to piece things together, heh.
      • drdaeman 7mo ago
        I do, but it somehow tends to forget how to do things right now and then - despite having notes in memories system - and starts to do them in its own weird ways. I’m going to experiment with skills next, or maybe make it build a few helper scripts for itself to quickly get some module source from nixpkgs matching flake.lock without having to think of it all. I’m positive about Claude for nix management, merely saying it’s not something that “just works” for now and reading nix code is still on the human part of the tandem. This said, to be fair - when it gets the approach right, it excels. I was setting up Ente for photos backup and sharing, and it produced a nice overlay with custom patches for my needs from just “figure out why /shared-albums/ redirects wrong and fix”. Found the module, the package, pulled source, analyzed it, proposed a patch (settings weren’t enough), did it - I only had to test, and only because I haven’t provided it with a browser. Felt amazing.
• snailmailman 7mo ago
  It doesn't help that there are two NixOS wikis. nixos.wiki and wiki.nixos.org. wiki.nixos.org claims that nixos.wiki is outdated and unofficial. But both appear to receive updates, and which one wins the SEO game is a coinflip whenever i google a nixos question.
  • Cyph0n 7mo ago
    nixos.org is the official wiki. It will take time for search ranking to beat the old one.
• Arelius 7mo ago
  You know, I used to agree, but what I realized, is I am a software engineer, and I'm used to working in large projects with source-code as the only documentation. And that's what's great about NixOS, you just clone nixpkgs and treat it like any other underdocumented software you might work on.
  • Cyph0n 7mo ago
    +1. I would also recommend using Github search to look for existing examples.
  • okanat 7mo ago
    > I'm used to working in large projects with source-code as the only documentation. As a software engineer I have an opposing attitude towards this. I work on projects with terrible documentation because somebody pays me to do so or there is a significant potential that I can unlock. There are significant alternatives to NixOS like bootable containers and OSTree which are more useful and better documented. If Nix project really cares about being competitive and adopt users, they have to document their stuff. They are already going against the grain and ain't nobody has time to put up with their weird language and their subpar documentation.
    • Arelius 7mo ago
      > I work on projects with terrible documentation because somebody pays me to do so or there is a significant potential that I can unlock. I mean, I'd argue there is significant potential, but really, for me it's just easy because I've been doing it for 20 years, and documentation is always fundamentally worse than code in some important ways. > If Nix project really cares about being competitive and adopt users, they have to document their stuff. This is one of the good/bad things about OSS.. most users don't provide positive value to the project. So do they really want to adopt users? Shrugs but the project is certainly competitive.
      • ofkwidjwus 7mo ago
        > for me it's just easy because I've been doing it for 20 years C’mon, just drop the “greybeard” act. Nix not having proper documentation is bad practice, period. No ifs buts or howevers, it’s just an objective fact. Good documentation is always (ALWAYS) a net positive, and this is an OS with it’s own unique mindset and way of doing things, good documentation is essential. End of.
• jmartens 7mo ago
  In a world of LLMs and agentic coding, I think documentation is less important.