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Arch and Gentoo users reading about NixOS
(sh.itjust.works)
It's not about the destination, it's about the journey.
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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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...to get a working config, you need to learn a whole new programming language and figure out the tweaks for each package you want to install, so I'd argue the journey is just as long
NixOS sounds like a way to avoid learning Linux by learning an abstraction.
that's why I only use my computer with raw system calls, shell is bloat
You guys use an OS? I just push the electrons around my motherboard manually with a little magnet on a toothpick.
That's why I used to use arch btw
I'd personally advise against NixOS as a first distribution for that matter. It's a great distribution, but if you want to understand the underlying mechanics, start with something where you interact with them, like Arch or whatever.
Nix is to Linux what Tailwind is to CSS
Ya, sucks when Tailwind goes out of style and now have to learn CSS again.
it's an abstraction yeah but understanding what exactly it is abstracting and how is where you'll get snags, it's definitely not a newbie distro.
Like everything with Nix, you pay a little more upfront to get a great experience later.
oh yeah, I daily drive NixOS and use it on my homelab as well
That's not true.
You have to get PhD in functional programming first.
Wait, are you saying my degree has real world use?
That would make it impure
That's why you go for GNU Guix instead, since it's the same kind of concept but configured using the Guile Scheme you already know.
(You do already know Scheme, right?)
⬅️➡️👊
It comes with a working config.
Adding applications and rebuilding is generally trivial.
The problem becomes if you want to use flakes or home manager, which you probably should. The config for those is complicated and poorly documented.
I don't know the programming language. I've been running it for about a month now. If you're not doing anything complicated or doing any crazy conditionals or running one config for 27 boxes it's no different than editing a yaml.
It took me about 2 days to get Nvidia working properly with offloading that was my hardest task so far.
But, at least in theory, you'll only do it once.
Well, I "did it" for an evening once, it was fun. The next day it got annoying REAL fast. But I do keep the config around, so I guess I can just go back to it eventually to keep doing it.
I'm just playing around with it on my home server, and yes, it does get annoying sometimes.
The whole system is far from being perfect, but I'm hoping for a mixture of learning on my side and improvements on the system's side.
I had no experience in nixOS, just went to the package website, it tells you exactly what to add to each section of the config.
Well not everything is packaged and when they aren’t it Can get more complicated to install since nixos doesn’t use the default file system layout. Another thing is that certain programs have assumptions about being able to do certain things like changing their own config files that don’t work well with the nixos way of doing things. (Looking at you fish(it works but you can’t manage your configuration for it(pretty sure?)with nix))
I haven't tried that one but besides the package page there is the options pages that gives you the ability to define config info.
https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=23.11&show=programs.fish.vendor.functions.enable&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=Fish
Yeah it’s been awhile since I looked at it but when I was managing my config for it with home manager it would straight up refuse to start.
Welcome to Linux; where your hardware and my hardware may act completely different. :)
not to mention how many things they want to go through their system. getting vim set up “their way” while also trying to install python3 support, vimtex, and plug-vim was almost impossible. not to mention finding a way to store the vim configs separately from the rest of nixos. (i use vim on multiple operating systems so switching everything to the nixos wasn’t a viable option.)
maybe there was a better way to do it that i didn’t know about, but boy did i try to find it.
you can just include dotfiles and the like in a nix config, while it's not the recommended way it usually works
in my experience installing support for most things is way easier on nix, as long as they're already packaged well. I'm still scared of the eventual time when I'll have to create my own package for the nix store to install from source
i think i would’ve probably had to package the specific kind of vim that i needed, because i wanted neovim and a gui too or something. this was also like 3-4 years ago so its possible the documentation for this kind of stuff has considerably improved since i tried, or that there are now packages that make this sort of thing easier. and it’s definitely possible everything existed at the time and i just couldn’t figure it out.
but i ended up with a similar feeling to the one you described: stuff is easy when you do it their way, using their tools; but things are very hard to do if you deviate from the path.
i know this is just sort of an inevitable part of the design paradigm they use, and that everything probably works very nicely if you learn their language and the various ins and outs of the operating system, but i just wasn’t willing to commit that much to it.
I really like most of it and started to daily drive NixOS a few months ago, but there's still some very valid criticisms to be made. Lack of documentation is probably the biggest one
i would like to give it another try at some point because it seems like it will probably feel really nice to use once i get the hang of it. but the lack of documentation is pretty rough.
i also think that for nixos, a lack of documentation is a much more difficult thing to overcome. other distros can piggyback off the arch documentation for most things, but that doesn’t work as well for nixos.
that's certainly true. I'd like to help improve the documentation, but unfortunately I'm still pretty green at Nix myself, so there's not much I can do at the moment. But it seems to be picking up speed recently, so there's hope that with more people better documentation is coming soon
The hard part is unlearning last century distro mindset, not this.
You still need to figure out the tweaks on other systems. Unless you want the Nvidia machine learning to complain that your C compiler is the wrong version and exit. Or maybe you'd prefer to deal with a package calling
psand parsing its output (?!) but you havepsthat's a different version so the output doesn't parse the sameI mean, when have we ever had a system that is working without any tweaks? Once you install third party packages, there's so many things that can go wrong
Idk flatpak and docker are pretty easy to set up. If anything gets too complicated it's easy to go back to old reliable.