I’ve been stuck on Nix for two weeks because I thought it would be a good idea to put a distro I had never used but that wouldn’t break on my backup laptop in case my main one ever broke. I just couldn’t force myself to install debian, not that I have anything against debian, it’s just… kinda boring, while Nix seemed very interesting. IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME I SWEAR.
Guess what happened… I broke Arch. Then I reinstalled and the next day the laptop broke. Then the next day I tried to get my data back and the hard drive broke. So, backup laptop with Nix for two weeks…
- I really really really like the declarative stuff. Installing packages through config files is so nice I’ll never lose track of what I’ve installed ever again 🥰 🥰 🥰 I was already using a git repo for all my config files + GNU Stow to symlink everything to its proper place, so adding the .nix configs to that setup was very easy.
- Having a clean system on rebuild is great. No more clutter left everywhere that I don’t know about, no more half broken stuff left lying around.
But…
- It’s not Arch. Not Nix’s fault, but I kept hearing that it would be “like Arch but declarative”… and it’s really not 😑 Everything seems over-complicated vs as simple as possible.
- I absolutely hate the language.
- What’s with those error messages from hell???
- And speaking of hell, every language that can’t just use indentations like YAML instead of cluttering the code with {} and [] and () should have been relegated to the darkest pit of hell 20 years ago. But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
- Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it’s unfair since it’s not trying to be a rolling release… but… but…)
- Where are the source packages? Is that an Arch only thing? I liked having packages that automatically use the latest git commit without needing to manually install from source and manually reinstall each time I want an update like a medieval peasant… 😭
- Nix packages are weird. Even someone who’s terrible at coding like me can read Arch PKGBUILDS… I miss you Arch 😢
- Apps not working because of paths that don’t exist on Nix… what do you mean I need to patch the package myself? 😭 But at least there’s steam-run, great preserver of what’s left of my sanity.
Can’t wrap my head around installing some stuff like VSCode extensions (the advice I got was "don’t bother just do it imperatively…)(Edit: Finally figured it out!!!)- Wiki is often sparse on info and not very helpful if you don’t already know what you are doing (and I clearly don’t 😅)
- Hidden configs. Some stuff works on its own like pipewire even though I haven’t installed or configured it (I went with a minimal install that just gave me a tty then build from there, no DE), and how it’s already configured is not in the default config files. It’s very confusing not knowing why some stuff works and how it’s configured by default.
But it’s kinda growing on me. Like mold. Or cancer. Brain cancer.
But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
Yeah, fuck that guy!
Skipped to the “ugly” part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?
I think a bigger problem is that it’s hard to find “best practices” because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.
Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it’s a struggle when it comes to doing things like “how do I change the source of a package”, “how do I compose two modules together” and “how do I add a repo to a flake so it’s visible in my config”. Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they’re taking about.
I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.
You only have one machine? I benefit from sharing configs between the laptop and the desktop. They are not the same, but I can easily copy paste a complex service I defined in my desktop to do the same thing on my laptop
I have a desktop, laptop, and a few VMs and servery things. Dotfile manager (yadm, which is a git wrapper) to sync personal settings, everything else I just do manually. The system-level configs are either different enough that standardizing them isn’t very helpful, or no more complicated than installing packages and activating services.
Activating services is the specific task NixOS is great at, you can just add it and it downloads the packages and starts it and generates the configs
Yeah, I’ll probably switch eventually I’m just trying to talk myself out of it because I don’t have the time to learn right now
For DevOps, it provides consistency for every CI run and production deployment, especially when a whole system needs to be shipped.
I’m always on the go, swapping PCs, travelling for medical reasons. Buy, sell, trade hardware. Nix allows me to boot into my system as if I never left with a simple hardware config update script. Rock solid consistency.
Is your hardware always the exact same? Because if it isn’t, then I’m sure you have to do modifications to your config file. And at that point you night as well just use a regular distro instead.
So what the main hassle of switching is that you have to run your hardware file to update for your new hardware, then inside your Nix config rarely will I ever have to edit things (maybe UUIDS if totally new machine fresh nix install/but I usually ssd swap for ease of transition and speed, or even clonezilla multiple drives and use as needed) even drivers for example. I’ve got auto scripts setup to run that will automatically pull any drivers or updates from the base system nix update to any drivers.
There’s really only two files you ever have to touch that I’ve used. Nix hardware, nix config. Once hardware is updated for which system you on you’ll never touch that until you boot a new machine with different hardware. If you setup nix how it’s supposed to be. Nix config is your master file. A single backup of that and when setup correctly. I can boot like I never left my machine. I’m talking librewolf still has my accounts open and logged in. VPN works. It’s all seamless damn near.
You have to learn to play within nixos sandbox meaning understand what your capable of doing and do it all inside config. With a few auto scripts, and 3 or 4 common commands on desktop page for whatever you wanna do and its terminal and memory hands off. I’ve what I call dumb Monkey commented my entire config and its in order if boot process from power on machine to boot, etc to shutdown.
A regular distro still poses many many more challenges when hardware swapping. You have different files to remember fstab, etc etc which can lead to mental memory load and system clutter if you didn’t build and maintain a perfect system from the beginning with stuff like files, sym links, all sorts if tweaks you’ve made over time.
So I switched to nix to mitigate those things. Now I’ve made a master config file copy, auto updates, backups, etc is all automated in the background now. All contained in my nix config. It’s supremely stable. Mental load is zero. Fills my use case. Immutable.
You have nothing to lose and only to gain. Pick any desktop environment and setup to your liking. I came from windows, to mint, to full custom nix all my apps, browsers, luks, apparmour, firejail, the whole stack.
I’ve tried live boots of many other distributions but this is the cleanest, leanest, most manageable of them all. My only true concern is project lasting long-term. For now. Aside from not having GUFW. I’m happy. I think there’s just a lot if misinfo and lack of hands on use from most people or incorrectly setup systems to utilize how nix should be ran. I think that should iron out over time.
You can manage multiple machines with a single Nix configuration git repository and modularize the configuration as much as you want. You can have a config with a desktop environment that you skip on servers, override individual variables for a specific host or do whatever you want. You can even remote deploy it all with a simple
nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host"and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).You run the script that generates hardware config file for you, it’s literally one command
Agreed with the article. There’s lots to dislike about Nix, but even with those downsides, NixOS is still better than any OS I’ve tried. Install an update and it’s borked? No worries. New PC and you want everything set up just like your old one? Copy one file over and it’s set up for you.
Copy one file over and it’s set up for you.
So, I’ve only played around with NixOS on a Raspberry Pi, but… Don’t people usually split their config up in multiple files, and then store than in a Git repository?
The process then still is: check out that Git repository, except there’s another step: copy over your private key so that you can decrypt your secrets.
Is that correct? Or did I make things needlessly complex for myself?
I don’t have any secrets in my config or a private key or anything and I’m currently running 4 servers from the same config (it used to be 8 or even more machines at some point even, including desktops).
But yes, it’s a multi-file config, it would be absolutely crazy to not split it up with how large it is.
