Hi everyone!
I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?
Thanks !
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Do you use Nix, personally? Also, it’s crazy that I found this post while thinking about distro hopping.
The above poster seems to use more ChatGPT than Nix, personally.
this comment reads suspiciously like it was written by an LLM (eg ChatGPT). was it? please don’t do that!
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thanks for clarifying. i’m deleting your generated comment per rule 4 (spamming) as well as two other generated comments you posted elsewhere; if another admin wants to undelete any of these i would be surprised.
please do not post LLM-generated comments without clearly labeling them as such. imo this is common sense, and doesn’t need its own rule, rule 4 is sufficient.
I don’t know whether just using an LLM is a problem. But in your case I would say the fact you used one and didn’t indicate you did. If you indicated the answer came from an LLM, then the trust in the answer could be weighted accordingly by each user.
That’s my opinion at any rate.
If OP wanted a response from an LLM, they would have typed their question into an LLM. The least you could do is label it as such.
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Rule or not, it’s pretty lame, look at the size of your post compared to how much info it gives, had you copied a article from some basic linux news stite, it would have given mostly the same output, now think about what linking a page to an article about nixos as a response to op trying to start a conversation about it would look like, rude.
I use an LLM to edit everything I write.
May I invite you to consider the pitfalls of such an approach?
Does this mean I have to label everything as LLM-generated?
Yes, that would be reasonable imo
Using an LLM to autocorrect your own words is not the same as copy-pasting an LLM response.
I think you should.
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Why don’t you label your name in every answer
You mean like a username that is listed in the header of every post and comment?
Why don’t you label your name in every answer, so we can check if you are hallucinating or making things up?
What?
I’m also curious why you feel the need to have an LLM edit your writing. What did you do before an LLM? And what benefit do you feel the LLM writing your comments is offering you and those reading your comments?
The admins did not remove the comment, a community mod did. Mods can impose further restrictions on their communities on top of instance wide rules (within reason of course), including banning LLMs. Lemmy.ml at least does not have a blanket ban on LLMs, but generally it’s expected that, 1, you should not post LLMs excessively, we mainly want to host discussions by humans, 2, you should disclose it’s from an LLM and which one it’s from, and preferably add to what it says with your own comments or analysis. If it’s a mix of LLM and your own writing, say so at the start of the comment, but if the community directly disallows LLMs then you shouldn’t post it there at all.
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Under the soon to be enacted EU AI laws such a bot would be limited-risk application (interaction with humans), the requirements for a text bot aren’t particularly high but also non-negotiable from a best practice POV: Stating front and centre that it’s an AI generated post. It’s also best practice to fulfil criteria necessary for high-risk systems voluntarily, the more you can fulfil I bet the less hostile people are going to be.
The library of congress has an executive summary of the thing.
(EU sources alas are a bit iffy at the moment there’s the commission version and the parliament amendments, haven’t seen a consolidated version yet. When will politicians start using proper VCS)
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Try not using an LLM to write what you…uh…write.
If your sources don’t match the claims no you’re not doing “the job” necessary to classify things as LLM-assisted instead of LLM-generated.
You suck
Do LLMs give citations? Otherwise, I could agree.
Do LLMs give citations?
(The citations in this comment appear to be all real links about NixOS, but they are not particularly relevant to the places in the comment where they’re cited.)
everyone
Now that’s what I’d call a stretch…
Indeed, why would I switch, already have been running NixOS for 10+ years.
I’ll edit. That was clearly a stretch
I used NixOS for a couple of years. My experience is like this:
- It is a rolling release (mostly)
- You write a declarative configuration for your system, e.g., my config will say I want Neovim with certain plugins, and I can also include my Neovim configuration
- It is stable, and when it breaks it is easy to go back
- Packages are mostly bleeding edge
The configuration stuff seems great. I guess it reduce the struggle of porting a full config from one pc to another right ?
Yes absolutely. It is really great. It is also a source of frustration, e.g., missing configuration options, non-obvious options and so on. Overall it works well.
You can even define configurations for different systems/hosts/users from a single place. I’ev atomized my config and I can reuse lots of parts for my different machines. Also my user config is nearly identical (except hardware specific things).
Note that there’s both the rolling unstable channel and a bi-annual stable release channel.
Important to note that NixOS has both a rolling release and point release version.
Wow, that sounds really cool (specially the config thing). I’ll have to try it sometime.
Are you still using it and happy with it? I’ve been increasingly using single purpose dev VMs in a server, and a declarative configuration system would make the process of spinning them up faster and more robust. My current shell script system is clunky, and I’ve been looking at Ansible.
Not using it anymore. Although I’m thinking about going back to it. The NixOS learning curve is a bit more steep than most other distros.
What are you using instead?
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Here’s the straightforward version of why I use it:
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The entire state of your operating system is defined in a config file, and changes are made by changing the config file. This makes it super easy to reproduce your exact system many times and to know where all the many different configuration elements that describe your system are located.
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Updates are applied atomically, so you don’t have to worry about interrupting the update process and if it fails, the previous state of your system is still bootable. By default every time you change something, you get another option in the boot menu to roll back to.
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Making container-like sub systems is super easy when you’re familiar with nix, so you can have as many different enclaves as you like for different software versions, development environments, desktop setups, whatever without taking a performance hit. Old versions of stuff are very accessible without breaking your new stuff.
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The package manager has a lot of software and accessing nonfree stuff is straightforward. Guix looks rad, but nix ended up being the more practical compromise for my usecase. I didn’t want to have to package a heap of software the moment I made the switch.
This very much. I used to have lots of unchecked config and state files everywhere on Arch. Now everything is checked in and wiped on boot so if something breaks after a reboot i know what broke.
Like how the opengl rendering did due to nixpkgs version differences
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I daily drive GNU Guix instead, and I would strongly recommend any emacs and/or lisp enthusiasts interested in the benefits of functional, reproducible, declarative, and hackable system management to give it a try!
Do you run the gnu guix distro or just use the package manager? Because iirc it uses only free software, even for drivers. So I imagine it is not that easy to find compatible hardware.
I run the complete system. It’s true that the standard iso comes with the linux-libre kernel and the standard channel (think repo) contains only free software. However there is the nonguix channel which comes with the full linux kernel, and all the proprietary drivers you could ask for.
Nonguix offer an iso with the full kernel too in case you have a proprietary wifi card and don’t have ethernet for the initial setup. The nonguix README I think is pretty clear, but Systemcrafters also made an excellent guide for doing this.
My wifi card unfortunately requires proprietary drivers and I have personally never had an issue with guix + nonguix for all my software needs, proprietary and otherwise.
Hope that helps profligate!
It’s insanely stable but you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software or making little tweaks. I played with it for hours the other day and I’m just too dumb to figure it out lol I think it’s just a super stable highly customizable distro for power users and a lot of people like that. If you can get over the learning curve it’s a pretty powerful and unique os
It’s kind of funny because I’d put NixOS on a complete newbies computer for sure, and recommend it to an expert… But I’m less sure if I’d tell a random mid-intermediate Linux user to switch.
Like if Grandma wants Linux on their computer to do some internet browsing for some reason… I’d absolutely put NixOS on it because it’s easy to manage the system for them… But somebody who is a little familiar with Linux already might be more confused about the differences. It’s kind of the ultimate beginner distro and the ultimate power-user distro, but a bit awkward between those extremes, haha.
It’s true that it can be a powerful distro but I’ve also heard from some users that the advanced-level documentation is lacking and only limited to forums and source code. I think maybe if the documentation was more thorough I would try nixos.
you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software
So, pretty much like any other distro
Most mainstream distro’s can do all of that without a CLI.
Weird, every distro I’ve tried either has no management, or doesn’t work. Just spins around loading. “Uninstalling” packages does nothing but remove them from the package manager.
Glancing over the website, I thought it’s an immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue. I could imagine that it might be cool to use with Ansible and stuff. But for an average user? I can’t really see the advantages in respect to the work you have to put in.
It is an immutable distro, altough it isn’t image-based like Fedora’s rpm-ostree.
NixOS basically replaces Ansible because the Nix package manager achieves the same goals already (configuration, deployment, …).
But I agree, the work necessary to put into this non-standard distro makes it hard to recommend for a casual user.
Because it’s the latest Cool Nerd Thing™ like Arch before it, and Gentoo before that. Most of the people raving about it probably don’t have much use for its features.
The features themselves are very useful for basically any user. Whether they are worth the non-standardness and issues that come with it is another question.
Solution without a problem. A cool solution but yeah.
I keep seeing trends with Linux distribution like teenager looking for new fashion.
I think it’s mostly the very young Linux user who hope from one distribution to the another over and over whereas many just stick with what they got : Ubuntu, Debian, mint, maybe fedora.
NixOS is certainly interesting tho.
Atleast NixOS isnt one of the countless Arch based distros emerged since pandemic
It’s in no way “everyone”, just a vocal minority.
I use
ArchNixOS BTW.
For those who like a video format, I found this introduction quite informative.
Thanks for this, it was definitely a nice overview. Not the first time I’d heard of NixOS, but I do seem to be seeing more frequent and more substantial discussions of it.
What I’m getting from all this, is that it looks to be a great way to set up reproducible desktop environments. And servers too, I suppose.
What I’m not getting from this: a compelling reason to switch from established players like RHEL and Ubuntu in combination with cloud-init and Terraform and the likes of Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt to spin up a cluster in the cloud, reconfigure, tear down, etc.
In case anyone is misreading me: this is not a dig at NixOS. It definitely looks interesting. Like, to the point that I’ll at least spin up a VM on my Manjaro laptop and see whether I should perhaps consider wiping and reinstalling with NixOS. The “configuration through code” is extremely appealing here.
My concern here is corporate inertia. And before anyone gets gets ready to launch a diatribe about how corporations don’t decide what the best tech is, I will agree with you. I’ve been around a while, and excitedly watched as Unix ramped up and displaced platforms like VAX/VMS and AOS/VS, using smaller and faster hardware. Then along came Linux and the battle for which distros would dominate.
As for configuration through code, I’ve been keeping a keen eye on things (tinkering when it’s been possible to do so) since the days of cfengine and Jumpstart. I used to share this site with anyone that would listen to me; it’s dated now, but the underlying principles are (were?) solid: http://infrastructures.org/
So for now, I think I’ll have to limit my professional NixOS usage to tinkering and potentially useful side projects. For personal usage? Yeah, it might become my daily driver, but I need to find the time to tinker.
I will say that I’m presently involved in an effort to test something out that has my company’s product available using rpm-tree. Not my decision, this is all being driven by a customer that has a lot of clout; they really, really want to use rpm-tree. It’s proven to be a bit onerous at times.
What this NixOS discussion has managed to do for me is to have me wondering whether a NixOS approach would have worked out better; my sense is that yeah, maybe it would have. But my feelings here might simply be the result of “woo, shiny new object”, which has definitely colored my opinions of things in my career of ~35 years. Something that I’ve had to restrain my excitement over, pending corporate sanity checks.
I was zzz until i heard having the ability to have different versions of packages installed at the same time without having the flatpak issue of having to have duplicates of the same package.
All-in-one config is definitely something I would’ve hoped Arch had (I just like the idea of everything user-related stored within /home because that makes fucking sense, no, homed doesnt do exactly that) so I’ll definitely check it out if my harddrive ever crashes or something.Having the option to have multiple versions of a dependency without needing to have duplicates of the same version alá flatpak seems like it should’ve been a no-brainer on any linux distro.
With that said I’m very comfortable with my current system, so definitely not until I get majorly fucked by my life-choices
Definitely sounds like a competent player in comparison to most distros though.And I feel like the terminal isn’t as big a barrier as everyone makes it out to be (part of why I say that is because I think the entire concept of “beginner friendly distros” only makes the terminal seem more impenetrable through that wording)
All-in-one config is definitely something I would’ve hoped Arch had as well, and as a bonus I would love a system that kept all things related to the user in /home (I’m not completely sure Nix does but I may as well throw that in) (homed does not do that as it still has entities outside of /home that you better back up, in fact you’ll risk being locked out of your user if you don’t)
as a bonus I would love a system that kept all things related to the user in /home
I’ve been using it for over a year and love it. A config file for your entire system, and built in rollbacks anytime something goes wrong. One language to configure everything, although in practice that doesn’t always work. But I love it.
Some others have started why it works, here is some how. Nixos completely disregards the fhs. Packages don’t install to anywhere standard, every package and configuration change gets it’s on directory in /nix/store but through smart use of tracking everything there, it symlinks all those files to proper places and sets up the environment for them to know where libraries are.
This is then also why you don’t need sudo privileges to install things. Your profile has an environment that is aware of your users packages and configurations, the system itself isn’t effected because everything is symlinked.
Then because every update means new directories in /nix/store you can role back to your last configuration because plasma broke something or whatever.
However, it’s a LOT to learn. Best place I know of is https://piped.video/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y&t=0
This guy did a good job for me. Hope this helps!
I switched around one and a half years ago. I must say, there are some hurdles to using NixOS. Mainly I dislike that it always takes around 20 times the effort to start and project. You make up for the initial time investment, because you end up with a far more stable setup, but still it does take some willpower to get things started.
I didn’t get it either, but this video does a pretty good job explaining why it’s different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY
