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Three Years of Nix and NixOS: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (pierrezemb.fr)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 36 points 1 year ago (15 children)

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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    For DevOps, it provides consistency for every CI run and production deployment, especially when a whole system needs to be shipped.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

    Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

    I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
    For example, I love KDE, but they really don't do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think you over complicating your view here. I daily nix. Your not carrying a bunch if dot files. You have one. A single nix. Config. That's it. It's not big, long, messy, what so ever. I have mine commented by section from boot order to auto updates and backups. Your talking about 150 lines of extremely short and almost self explanatory code. I came from mint having never used nix. I figured it out doing a custom luks install and the whole custom build from scratch in no time.

    Your diff issue is overblown. The edits you make are small and you cannot get lost in multiple configs unless your doing entire system writes which you would never do. I use a dead light weight diff GUI or terminal. This has to be one if the cleanest, maintenance free distros I have ever used.

    It doesn't seem you have truly driven Nix with this take. No program writes directly to your config, even if there was say your temp scenario you reboot and temps would wipe away like you never did them unless you rebuild nix config. Most of your concerns would fall away once you really drove nix to see how it functions.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say "dotfiles", I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don't have to deal with the dotfiles myself.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I've used nixos exclusively lately. It's been awesome. No system scatter, clutter. It'd immutable. There's very slight driver hassle (you don't have GUI for drivers so a simple terminal command fetches everything you need.) in cinnamon. I came from mint. I have all basic commands in executable files on desktop for ease of hassle. It's not about rebuilding the system. Its about being hands off. Next to zero maintenance because not much in your system gets altered. I went for a full custom install from terminal. The only thing I personally miss being GUI is a firewall like UFW or GUFW.

    Overall its more rock solid and workable than likely every distro I have ever tried. The feature set is nice, easy rollbacks, fucking cake backups. All you have to know is your entire system lives on one small editable file called nix. Configuration. Keep it in a micro SD or USB or any backup and it's as if you never left. Any changes you want you simply tweak in the config then reboot. If it breaks then select your previous gen number on boot and your exactly where you was before.

    I diff my edits and keep copies, run auto backups, and more. It's so hands off that I haven't found a better replacement yet. My single biggest concern is long-term viability in the project.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Loved nixOS but couldn't install PIA VPN gui and disliked the workarounds. Also doing .net dev was more awkward than I liked so went back to Arch and wrote some scripts to install all the packages I want instead. Love the idea of nixOS though.

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