A new video from Nick at The Linux Experiment. I’m also sharing the PeerTube version for the sake of trying to expand my use of PeerTube and try to expand my video platform use beyond just YouTube.
NixOS is one of the few distros that legitimately offers something different. Some nice things:
- The entire OS install is managed through config files, so instead of dealing with a billion shitty DSLs, you only deal with one.
- Because of the above, builds are also reproducible.
- Because it ditches the FHS for the Nix store, you can do things like install multiple versions of the same library side-by-side, which is impossible with traditional Linux package management.
- It has the largest package repository of any Linux distro.
- Setting up dev environments is really nice because with Nix it’s like the entire OS has VirtualEnv.
- Because of the above, “it works on my machine” is an excuse of the past.
It’s very impressive and is a welcome innovation to the Linux ecosystem. Now if only they could improve the tooling and documentation.
I was interested in trying NixOS before after many years of Linux experience but I couldn’t understand what advantages it had over my current setup. It just mostly seemed more complicated than it needed to be for little to no gain.
The reproducibility aspect of it can be achieved on other Linux platforms or in other environments so it wasn’t a big draw for me. I already have backups too. Making it easily deployable seems like the same use case as for instance, docker, which is available everywhere already.
I love projects like this though so I fully support it!
“Seriously, NixOS is the new Arch when it comes to telling people you use it” …as an Arch user, I feel both attacked and intrigued.
But seriously, it’s pretty amazing how far the community has come now that having to use the package manager through the command line and editing config files is considered a significant barrier to entry. I’m interested to give it a try to see if the purported advantages with respect to reproducibility and portability are actually robust enough to suit my own use cases.
I have been using a nixos build as my daily non work driver for a while now. As a DevOps guy, I appreciate the define once, build almost anywhere nature. When it is time to upgrade the laptop, just copy over the config and run. Then move over my personal data.
I find Nix to be a really esoteric platform that completely inscrutable to a regular user. The people who do use it are extremely hostile to any tools that simplify the experience for the end user like Fleek. I would not recommend it for ANY regular user in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah this is unfortunately true. I love NixOS and I use it constantly but I’m also a professional developer so it’s pretty easy for me. If I weren’t I imagine it would be close to impossible.
Unfortunately it’s very difficult to browse or understand how to use Nix, and the Nix language itself is quite opaque.
I love the results, but I wish it were done in … basically anything other than Nix.
Theoretically there is Gnu Guix, which uses Guile… I have no clue what support for it is like though.
NixOS base + flatpak for Desktop apps sounds very interesting, one of the Linux Unplugged podcast hosts have been doing that setup for a while now, they also had a NixOS challenge some months ago
This is how I run my daily driver since a time. Coming from Redhat -> Suse -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Arch (-> Fedora) I feel very stable with NixOS.
The main system is NixOS with Flakes enabled, the user apps are installed with home-manager and on top a couple of desktop Flatpaks.
In between I did try to switch back to other distros taking less compilation time but there are so many features in Nix keeping me.
- the immutable system
- reproducible builds
- switchable generations
- easiness to maintain in a Git repo
- very fresh
