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Many may wonder like me WTF is NixOS? The key feature is 'declarative system configuration'. Sort of Puppet/Chef/Ansible/CFengine build-in. Heavily oriented on

Many may wonder like me WTF is NixOS? The key feature is 'declarative system configuration'. Sort of Puppet/Chef/Ansible/CFengine build-in. Heavily oriented on DevOPs culture. The OS allows you to test package installs without the fear of breaking the system. You can always roll back to a previous known-good state.

rejschaap 12y ago
Is it really based on devops culture? To me it always made sense to be able to say I want to do X, Y and Z... figure it out. Even distributions that have state-based procedural package managers could at least keep a list of things I actually want to use. I never understood Debian doesn't provide this by default, at the very list let me see the list of packages I explicitly installed. If I accidently install Gnome 3 and then remove it I'm left with a lot of useless junk everywhere bloating up my system. PS. I know there are some really fickle and obscure commands to get the list of explicitly installed packages PPS. Maybe Gnome 3 isn't the best example, except that it would definitely be an accident if I installed it. PPPS. The useless junk floating around probably shouldn't bother me that much, but it does.
- zokier 12y ago
  apt-get autoremove
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  As you noted, yes, Debian has a list of the packages you explicitly installed. The problem is with the recommendations, they are very numerous, and any package that the maintainer thinks should be used together with one of your automatically installed ones will make it stay. Anyway, NixOS is based on immutable states. It keeps lots and lots of states (much worse than Debian on that), but they shouldn't be a problem for anything (I've not used it enough in practice to be sure).
vanschelven 12y ago
I've always thought it was heavily based on the ideas from functional programming (making state explicit, being able to move more freely through time). In any case it precedes the recent hype around DevOps.
japaget 12y ago
It's a Linux distribution. See http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=NixOS http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=NixOS .
Ixiaus 12y ago
Not quite. Chef/puppet/ansible are configuration management and server automation tools. While you could design a .nix package that describes the state of the whole sever that would be tedious. Ansible and nix compliment each other nicely as tools. Nix gets you highly reliable package management using principles from functional languages. Gnu guix is an alternative to Nix (the package manager).
- Nullabillity 12y ago
  > While you could design a .nix package that describes the state of the whole sever that would be tedious. Except this is pretty much what NixOS does (compared to Nix).

rejschaap 12y ago

Is it really based on devops culture? To me it always made sense to be able to say I want to do X, Y and Z... figure it out. Even distributions that have state-based procedural package managers could at least keep a list of things I actually want to use. I never understood Debian doesn't provide this by default, at the very list let me see the list of packages I explicitly installed. If I accidently install Gnome 3 and then remove it I'm left with a lot of useless junk everywhere bloating up my system. PS. I know there are some really fickle and obscure commands to get the list of explicitly installed packages PPS. Maybe Gnome 3 isn't the best example, except that it would definitely be an accident if I installed it. PPPS. The useless junk floating around probably shouldn't bother me that much, but it does.

zokier 12y ago
apt-get autoremove
marcosdumay 12y ago
As you noted, yes, Debian has a list of the packages you explicitly installed. The problem is with the recommendations, they are very numerous, and any package that the maintainer thinks should be used together with one of your automatically installed ones will make it stay. Anyway, NixOS is based on immutable states. It keeps lots and lots of states (much worse than Debian on that), but they shouldn't be a problem for anything (I've not used it enough in practice to be sure).

vanschelven 12y ago

I've always thought it was heavily based on the ideas from functional programming (making state explicit, being able to move more freely through time). In any case it precedes the recent hype around DevOps.

japaget 12y ago

It's a Linux distribution. See http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=NixOS http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=NixOS .

Ixiaus 12y ago

Not quite. Chef/puppet/ansible are configuration management and server automation tools. While you could design a .nix package that describes the state of the whole sever that would be tedious. Ansible and nix compliment each other nicely as tools. Nix gets you highly reliable package management using principles from functional languages. Gnu guix is an alternative to Nix (the package manager).

Nullabillity 12y ago
> While you could design a .nix package that describes the state of the whole sever that would be tedious. Except this is pretty much what NixOS does (compared to Nix).