I’ve used NixOS, wasn’t that big of a fan. I certainly love the idea, but not the execution. Fedora Atomic just comes out of the box as a more complete, configured system that’s easier to understand.
I have been meaning to use Nix on Atomic, but the problem is that since / is immutable, Nix cannot create /nix and so doesn’t work properly. But there are workarounds for that issue, I just haven’t tried them yet.
Nix certainly fixes the PATH issues of homebrew since it has its unique linking system.
It’s pretty minimal out of the box (a bit like Arch). Unlike Fedora with SELinux or Ubuntu with AppArmor which come configured and enforcing out of the box.
Nix is a programming language, and a complex one at that. There are plenty of ways to achieve the same goal. But as a novice or even intermediate user, it’s hard to know which is the best way. It also doesn’t help when you go with Way A and later want to do something else, but you find someone’s setup that uses Way B. Should I switch to Way B too? Or should I try to combine both ways into Way C?
Flakes. First off, it’s annoying to have everyone say that NixOS is declarative and reproducible. Then you look into it a bit more and the story changes to “oh actually you need to enable this experimental feature to get better reproducibility”. But the part that actually annoys me is how everyone uses flakes and expects you to too, but it’s been an experimental feature forever and doesn’t seem any closer to becoming not-experimental.
Linking issues. Say I install something like nvim with nix, then an nvim plugin wants to install something. That plugin isn’t aware of nix and tries to do things the Unix way, but that breaks. I know there are two solutions/workarounds to this problem; some packages are patched to avoid this and there’s something you can put in your configuration that “emulates” a more traditional environment that’s more compatible.
I like sandboxing so I would use flatpak in NixOS. But there was some issue with fonts and icons I believe. I can’t remember if this PR fixed it or not: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/119433
Not the best UX out of the box. It’s common to find people with nix caches of hundred of gigabytes large because the system doesn’t automatically clean things up.
But the part that actually annoys me is how everyone uses flakes and expects you to too, but it’s been an experimental feature forever and doesn’t seem any closer to becoming not-experimental.
Lix at least doesn’t pretend that Flakes is something obscure.
Then you look into it a bit more and the story changes to “oh actually you need to enable this experimental feature to get better reproducibility”.
This unfortunately gets misunderstood a lot, mostly because of the stupid flake hype. You do not need flakes for reproducibility, Nix comes with a fetchTarball builtin function which allows you to pin a specific Nixpkgs commit and output hash.
You’re right though, I agree on basically every point (including the part about flakes).
I’ve never tried these “distroless” systems before. Curious about these setups. Have you tried nix pkg manager in place of brew?
I’ve used NixOS, wasn’t that big of a fan. I certainly love the idea, but not the execution. Fedora Atomic just comes out of the box as a more complete, configured system that’s easier to understand.
I have been meaning to use Nix on Atomic, but the problem is that since / is immutable, Nix cannot create /nix and so doesn’t work properly. But there are workarounds for that issue, I just haven’t tried them yet.
Nix certainly fixes the PATH issues of homebrew since it has its unique linking system.
Would you mind elaborating on that? I do have some suspicions but I would love to hear what bothered you about it.
Lix at least doesn’t pretend that Flakes is something obscure.
This unfortunately gets misunderstood a lot, mostly because of the stupid flake hype. You do not need flakes for reproducibility, Nix comes with a
fetchTarballbuiltin function which allows you to pin a specific Nixpkgs commit and output hash.You’re right though, I agree on basically every point (including the part about flakes).