Whats the deal with NixOS? I just actually looked into it and it seems really based and exactly what Ive been looking for. What dev controversies and shady shit have I yet to see?
Intro to NixOS
Ayden Cook
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Hunter Smith
Never understood what's the use case, just apt install whatever you want.
Dylan Lewis
No cirno, no bump.
Nathaniel Gonzalez
NixOS is great if you want to waste time learning an obscure Lisp dialect just to set up a configurationfile that does the same shit like dnf, apt, zypper and whatever else. Then after succesful installation you ask yourself if you learnt anything, and then you realize you didn;t and then you ask yourself if it was worth it and then you realize it wasn't and then you just delete the partitions, download Ubuntu and install it within 7 minutes and get a system running with everything you need
Brayden Rogers
>bisexual colors
into le trash it goes
Caleb Wood
Everything about it is extremely amateurish. It was literally designed by a PhD student with no experience building real world software and jobless autists attached themselves to the project over the years. The multiple CLIs are slow, unintuitive, non-orthogonal, and poorly documented. nix-shell supports bash, zsh, and fish, but the new "nix develop" supports only bash. Why? Who knows.
Nixxies will say "b-but Shopify uses it", but if you actually read interviews with Shopify devs they will admit that it takes ridiculous gymnastics with the Nix expression language to accommodate simple workflows. That's why they don't use Nix directly. Instead, they abstract over it with a custom in-house tool, at which point you might as well skip this autistic affair and use Linux containers directly (like Silverblue does).
Anyone shilling this trash has never used it beyond nix-env -qa, nix-env -i, and nix-env -e.
Eli Jackson
Not many controversies in the Nix community. Or at least not really any infighting.
As for things that might not be so great:
1. Nix as a language is kind of a pain to learn if you just want to config stuff with it. It is pretty nice once you get use to it because everything is basically a DST that lets you make function calls. is wrong for calling it Lisp in any sense. That would be Guix
2. Current Nix tools are divided into the older
Josiah Murphy
>What dev controversies and shady shit have I yet to see?
there's nothing controversial and nothing shady. it solves a real problem, but is that a problem you have? the costs—in time—of getting everything working are (potentially) huge. would it be worth it?
it's all an inconsistent, constantly changing mess. writing your own derivations and overlays and flakes is an extreme pain in the ass. "best practices" seem to keep changing. i wasted a weekend on it and realised that spending any more time would be pointless. maybe the ideas will find a clearer, more professional expression a decade from now
try it out and see for yourself
Hunter Reed
>Honestly those are really the only controversies I know about, and I've been using it for ~5 years now.
Well they are big cons. Documentation is the first thing you look for to start adopting a project in your env, if they don't fix that asap nix[os] is doomed to die.
Jacob Clark
What about Guix?
Dominic Lee
>What about Guix?
i've never used it, but the general impression i've gotten is that it's in the same category as NixOS, but it's better-designed and (somehow) even more niche and thinly documented. the project also has an extreme advocacy for free software, to the point that much useful software can only be found in a community-maintained repo (gitlab.com
Jace Cox
My main issue is organization. I usually wipe and reinstall very often because the system feels too dirty. I need to keep my environment clean and simple or I end up not opening my computer for months which is counterproductive and what caught my eye abt nix was the rollbacks and reproducibility, and also the configuration conglomeration. Does it actually solve my problems?
Nix as opposed to other distros. I hate apt. It not reliably removing packages does not help. Fuck aptitude.
Charles Nelson
> if they don't fix that asap nix[os] is doomed to die.
It's been around for 19 years and has taken off in popularity in the past 4. You are just objectively wrong. If it's doomed to die it won't be anytime soon.
In your case, then yea it will solve your problem. All packages and configs are kept in /nix/store and everything else is just symlinks to it. Updating or rolling back is just changing those symlinks and restarting services.
Jordan Richardson
>taken off in popularity
lmao
Jayden Nguyen
Are there any alternatives whats the deal with Guix?
Eli Robinson
> it's been around for 19 years and has taken off in popularity in the past 4
Exactly. nixos wasn't even alive back then
In the past 4 years there weren't projects directly competing in the same domain like silverblue and micrOS
They had a decade to become relevant and get inertia that they also miss because shit management like in the docs. It's something so simple to understand I wonder how retarded the nixos devs are, seriously.
The first thing you look for and the one of the main drivers of sw choice is the fucking documentation. You can forgive some missing feature and non functional reqs, but shit documentation is the thing that worst than anything bites you back and slow down later in the project
Jonathan Turner
>no use flags
hard pass
Angel Allen
honestly it seems like nix makes use flags obsolete. It solves a proper superset of the problem that use flags solve
Wyatt Rivera
It's not just the absence of quality docs. The people working on NixOS are just not very good at design.
Asher Sullivan
I've used it and I didn't really get deep into it. I found the tools to be a bit difficult to get used to. NixOS is mostly hype.
I learned how to install packages and customize the nix.env. That's about it. Of all Linux distros I've ever used, NixOS was the biggest timesink. It was lacking in packages and documentation. They try to encourage users to repackage software for Nix. I'm sorry but I want my OS to work.
Its unfortunate because Nix has good ideas and it handles packages really well. Then again I've never had package management issues with Debian or Ubuntu.
I'm not sure if GUIX is any better. They did the autistic freetard shit and remove all software that isn't good enough for GNU. They don't seem to offer 3rd party repos or a non-free repo. Into the trash with both of them. Both had great ideas but idiots fucked it up.
Levi Harris
> In the past 4 years there weren't projects directly competing in the same domain like silverblue and micrOS
Congratulations, you have lost any and all credibility by thinking they are in the same domain. Let me guess, you think they're similar because you read the words "immutable" in their descriptions on Wikipedia?
Funny thing is your criticisms on the documentation aren't unfounded, but you're obviously just parroting. Come back when you can describe to me *exactly* what's wrong with it besides what I mentioned earlier. No point in arguing about anything further.
Gavin Mitchell
are you even supposed to use nix on desktop? I thought it was for reproducible dev environments and server deployment
William Baker
Guix is basically the same thing as Nix. Same thing with GuixSD vs NixOS.
The 2 major differences are:
- Guix is a dialect of Lisp. Nix is its own style of language.
- Guix packages are only accepted to the repo if they are 100% FOSS. You can package proprietary software with it, but it won't be accepted to the upstream repos.
Funny thing is that you can install Nix on GuixSD and Guix on NixOS if you'd like. Since they essentially use their own package namespace you can have them side-by-side without any issues. In fact you can usually install them on any Linux distro. Nix can even be installed on MacOS and Windows