NixOS

It's a software product, not a political ideology. The makers are the best people to describe the reasoning for its existence. Immutable operating systems are obviously a foreign concept to most people having been spawned from Eelco Dolstras dissertation 10 years ago. There's nothing wrong with an argumentative list of reasons why the concept of NixOS is a good idea.

>There's nothing wrong with an argumentative list of reasons why the concept of NixOS is a good idea.
If you also give me a list of reasons of why it is a bad idea. user, they are just selling you their product.

It's pretty cool what it can achieve, but an unix system full symlinks will never feel clean

It's literally Free Software licensed under MIT and GPL. I run NixOS on all of my PCs and it's been the cleanest computing experience I've ever had. Ofcourse there's cons, like the abstractions the system introduces and thus added underlying complexity, or even learning curve of the Nix language, I've never denied this. But the pros far outweigh the cons for me. How NixOS differs from a regular unix is clearly mentioned on the nixos website. You can make up your mind about whether these differences are cons or pros.

>How is it better?
No needless systemd dependency. It uses an actual programming language instead of a castrated DSL version of Haskell.

I don't know what redpill means, but Guix is superior.

Attached: guixsd.png (462x287, 13K)

You get severely limited in packages though right?

Guix and SilverBlue. They succeed on what Nix started in different ways. With GuixSD, here's what a developer had to say comparing Guix and Nix.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16490027
SilverBlue uses OSTree for the system layer + Flatpak, Podman, or some other containers of choice for the application layer. SilverBlue/Atomic is less flexible compared to Nix and has only the advantages of not requiring cascading updates which could murder some systems (I'm sure deploying Nix from a separate server so this point is kind of shit) and already has brainlet friendly tools that update the system tree and containers. So I was being mostly inflammatory but I think in the end OSTree's approach will be more widely adopted.

I have a question for you. Does Nix support updating the entire system atomically without rebooting? OSTree systems don't but I know Ubuntu is pushing (not atomic) rebootless updates.

NixOS has a lot of packages - github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs

No, what's with that assumption? NixOS's whole idea is to fix package management and dependancy hell. They did so both formally and practically with the creation of Nix. It has lots of packages and it's easy to package, I packaged an application myself. There's also a kind of "AUR" for NixOS called NUR.

>what's with that assumption?
It's a pretty reasonable one, like with any less popular OS.

50994 packages to be exact. nixos.org/nixos/packages.html

If you package an app yourself how does it rebuild from a script?

It's very easy to package your own separate packages for your system. Here's an example on how to package a small GNU application: nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/generic-builders.html

You would then do (import hello.nix) in environment.systemPackages in your central configuration.nix. very comfy in my opinion. I use it especially for small bash scripts. Instead of being chucked into some random dir that's in PATH my scripts are instead nicely integrated into the system.

I mean the whole os is built by a script right?

If you get a clean drive and install nixos and then put the script in, it will fail to install the packages you had to manually package, and you’ll have to do it again?

no, the script builds the package
what are you confused about?

I think you're misunderstanding how smart Nix manages and builds the system. For my ThinkPad I have a configuration.nix script file that declares what packages should be installed and how they're configured. I bought another ThinkPad once and instead of wasting time installing everything all over again I simply put NixOS on a USB, booted it up and cloned my existing NixOS configuration.nix and let NixOS build the entire system. The result was a perfect clone of the operating system I had on my previous ThinkPad. NixOS is not just a script that does "mkfs.ext4 && pacstrap && .. etc", way more advanced than that.

Here's an example configuration.nix, it defines an entire operating system: ordinatechnic.com/os-specific-guides/nixos/nixos-configuration

>GuixSD
>Only free software and no systemd
I do understand why they are not successful

and then after assessing this for a while, some people who were working on it left and, starting fresh with everything they had learned, created guix
a logical continuation and notable improvement of all the wonderful work started with nix

I love GNU and Free software. But after multiple attempts I unfortunately still couldn't get GuixSD configured to the level I had NixOS configured. I want both to succeed, they obviously share similar ideas.

Has anyone written an up-to-date qutebrowser package for Guix?

systemd sucks, guixsd cool

Linux can't do one step forward and two backwards every single time

NixOS choosing to use systemd as a default is precisely what you're describing.

Yeah so it builds the system, and then when it gets to a package that you packaged yourself, it cannot download it from the repository so the .nix script wont install that package on the new pc?

My understanding is the nix script that builds the os up from scratch with your packages & settings requires that all packages be from the nixos repository, if that isnt the case how is it fixed?

You have to give the nix script the pckage you packaged alongside it?

when you define a package you tell it where to download from and how to build it
if your system build script contains a custom package definition, when it gets there, it builds it for you as you defined
sounds like your mind's stuck in apt world
free yourself
you could perhaps conceptually do what we're talking about with any package manager, nix and guix just bring it to the front and make it easy and painless

Ah I see, but then you must give it some url, and hopefully the package is from a stable site that maintains this.

Otherwise I assume its possible to host the file in a network drive and direct the script to download an build from there as a backup?

>filling a hole with another and calling it an improvement

Hard to install :(