There is a Gnome/KDE installer too now ;)

This is the opposite of me. I always get nervous when I don’t have precise control over how the disk layout looks. I explicitly decided for the non-graphical installer when I first downloaded NixOS

My OS is also a tool!

Those jerk OSs and their bullying!

The obvious sane default is 1 partition covering the whole disk, + EFI system partition. What’s there to offer…

I need to compile my kernel… by hand with tools from beige-age computing.

Sounds like you haven’t done it in a while. It has calamares installer now.

Slackware still does that in 2024.

How long ago did you try? You should try again, I did not have this experience setting up with the graphical installer a few weeks ago.

it wanted me to setup my own partitions manually

You’ve obviously never used nix, it’s GUI installer can auto configure just fine.

When your OS AND apps are declared and stateful a lot of risk and complexity is removed. Configuring is just a bad experience with poor usability and worse documentation.

Where do you draw the line though between tool and lifestyle? At setting up partitions (which is a trivial thing I would not mind at all)?

Its especially annoying for me because i wanna go back to something that “just works” but i miss the nix features. I like declaring my system but managing packages declaratively is just such a pain. I just wanna do apt-get install package its just easier i dont want to rebuild my whole ass system. Something i found that may work is using nix for the system and then distrobox for packages. Yall think thats something that would work well?

Same, I could not go back now.

Just to clarify, I wouldn’t recommend putting everything in a single file, but rather modularize the configuration.

I also came from Arch, but have since abandoned it, and I don’t think I want to use distributions for myself that use the the classic imperative concept. One you get a better understanding of it, it makes so much more sense.

I’m running openSUSE because I like lizards.

NixOS is probably a bit more confusing than most Linux distros, but it has a huge amount of advantages too. It has very up to date software and probably never has dependency issues.

Foxes are like that though.

They look cute and cuddly… The trustworthy kind, then they bite your hand off and laugh at you.

Yeah, you want to sniff nix first before you mainline nixos.

How does that work? Let’s say I’m on pop os developing a thing, how would I manage deps and dev envs with nix then? In a VM or what?

I’m a Linux nerd, but I totally don’t get nix. Tried to install some nix package manager on my Debian based distro and it was completely broken (the nix thing, not my os)

as a fox myself, i would not recommend it.

Wow thanks I was wondering for a while if something like this existed! I’m very happy with regular Arch, but I am very curious to try both an immutable/atomic and a declarative distro. At least the second I guess I can kina replicate now with this. Another rabbit hole to go down I think. :D

Even when using in a basic way, I think it has one very tangible advantage: the fact that you can “compartmentalize” different aspects of your configuration.

Let’s say I set up a specific web service that I want to put behind a reverse proxy, and it uses a specific folder that doesn’t exist yet, like Navidrome which is a web-based audio player. It requires a set of adjustments of different system parts. My nix file for it looks like this:

{ config, ... }:

let
  domain = "music." + toString config.networking.domain;
in
  {
    services.navidrome = {
      enable = true;
      settings = {
        Address = "127.0.0.1";
        Port = 4533;
        MusicFolder = "/srv/music";
        BaseUrl = "https://" + domain;
        EnableSharing = true;
        Prometheus.Enabled = true;
        LogLevel = "debug";
        ReverseProxyWhitelist = "127.0.0.1/32";
      };
    };

    services.nginx = {
      upstreams = {
        navidrome = {
          servers = {
            "127.0.0.1:${toString config.services.navidrome.settings.Port}" = {};
          };
        };
      };
    };

    services.nginx.virtualHosts."${domain}" = {
      onlySSL = true;
      useACMEHost = config.networking.domain;
      extraConfig = ''
        include ${./authelia/server.conf};
      '';
      locations."/" = {
        proxyPass = "http://navidrome";
        recommendedProxySettings = false;
        extraConfig = ''
          include ${./authelia/proxy.conf};
          include ${./authelia/location.conf};
        '';
      };
    };

    systemd.tmpfiles.settings."navidrome-music-dir"."${toString config.services.navidrome.settings.MusicFolder}" = {
      d = {
        user = "laser";
        mode = "0755";
      };
    };
    systemd.services.navidrome.serviceConfig.BindReadOnlyPaths = ["/run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf"];
      
    security.acme.certs."${config.networking.domain}".extraDomainNames = [ "${domain}" ];
  }

All settings related to the service are contained in a single file. Don’t want it anymore? Comment it out from my main configuration (or whereever it’s imported from) and most traces of it are gone, the exception being the folder that was created using systemd.tmpfiles. No manually deleting the link from sites-available or editing the list of domains for my certificate. The next generation will look like the service never existed.

And in my configuration, at least the port could be changed and everything would still work – I guess there is room for improvement, but this does what I want pretty well.

cool

Based

Very well built patches and ways to share them. This is a good thing for gaming as we can try bleeding edge like Arch. But without having to rely on AUR or scripts to copy locally. Thanks to Nix Flakes you simply reference the flake someone shared (after double checking what is in it) and rebuild a NixOS derivation and voila, patch installed. I installed a complete SteamOS in 1 minute with this, reboot and everything works. Even with your locally signed in Steam account 👌

nothing imo, it’s main benefit is making reproducible environments, imagine you need 10 machines to have the exact same things running on it, setting up each one would be a PITA and keeping them the same is near impossible, nixos solves that problem.

it’s not gonna do anything for you, most people just want a working OS system on your PC so that you can do the things you need to do, if you have that, there is no reason to be fucking around with nixos.

Everything about your OS is defined in a config files and can be rebuilt. You break something you don’t need to do a complete reinstall if you can’t figure it out. Just rebuild the last working configuration. Sharing builds with your friends is easier.

For gaming getting your graphics card going is much simpler. I never had steam and proton games run as well as they do with they nixos defaults

Imo the worst part of nix is how it turns into this chicken or the egg scenario. Let me explain, nix is very good at reproducing things. It ensures that all things are the same when installing a piece of software. Once someone writes a nix module, generally speaking, it “just works”. You can always take that nix file and get it to run the same way on another machine. But since most gamers/musicians don’t give two shits about reproducible software, it doesn’t get packaged. And with no packages they will never be interested to get into nix.

As I write this though I realize, many open source projects have struggled with getting contributions from the community. Personally, I just think nix solves the issue of “idk, it works on my machine” better than anything I’ve seen. Being able to reproduce software and stop dependency issues is a very valuble thing, just not for everyone.

Damn you broke my brain for a second there. I thought you meant that nixos replaced k8s, and was wondering what the hell are you talking about.

Yeah. I had a similar experience. My first successful install, following the docs, didn’t have a network stack. It turns out that the docs are not representative of what’s considered best practices at this point. I also don’t care for needing a new DSL for a single use case.

So, for me, it’s a non-starter. Fedora Atomic is meeting my needs nicely at this point. NixOS has brought some excellent ideas to the forefront and is a great match for some people. I’ll pass until I can use my JSON/YAML/TOML and the docs are useable.

i nuked my nixos install twice to install guix and twice I went back to my nix setup. GuixSD is missing a certain polish to it. It feels like it’s on the way there but probably not yet…

the second time was just last week, after setup on sway, I installed flatpak apps and tried setting up nix-env for packages, some XDG_DATA_DIR fucked up and I couldn’t even see the installed packages or start them from a terminal

servers are also slow and rebuilding is a fucking pain

Not really, other than banning those who disagreed publicly