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 !
deleted by creator
Here’s the straightforward version of why I use it:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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 have been using for years on servers. My lemmy instance is hosted on it.
Although for desktop I had too many issues back in 2019 so I ended up back to Arch Linux and then EndeavourOS
Would be fun to try again to use it on desktop
I think I will give it a try on a server first, I don’t have a playbook or script for a reproducible set up (yet), so I may as well use Nix to see if it’s worth the hype
It’s in no way “everyone”, just a vocal minority.
I use
ArchNixOS BTW.
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.
NixOS is a fully declarative and reproducable system.
What this means is that you can create a single
configuration.nix, which includes all of your applications, settings, aliases, environment variables, user account + groups, etc., and copy that over to another NixOS machine (including different architectures) and runnixos-rebuild bootto completely reproduce the system on that other machine.The nix package manager is also really good at telling you if the configuration will break anything, where, and how, and refuses to apply until the issue is fixed.
Also every time you use
nixos-rebuild, it creates a new generation of your NixOS install meaning if something ends up breaking, you can reboot into the old system.So for example, I can theoretically have the exact same configuration across my desktop, laptop, phone, server, etc., minus the automatically generated
hardware-configuration.nix, which is specific to the hardware.Also Nix supports package overlays, which means that you can modify an existing package while the maintainer still keeps it up to date.
Oh boy my two cents time!
I love the concept of NixOS. A fully declarative , reproduceable system from a single config repo! Sounds theoretically like it would be my kind of thing.
Sure, theoretically, I could have a fully reproduceable system. The time spent declaring that fully reproduceable system though… I remember the first time I was trying to get my usual disk setup of, a luks encrypted btrfs partition with multi-factor enabled decryption/authentication.
On a normal install it would take like a day at worse to install your distro. My first attempt with NixOS took me almost 4 days of screwing around in configs. 2 of those days were probably cumulatively spent waiting for the config option list of the nixos manual to search for text. And the number of redundant config options which all do the same thing! Or, are supposed to all do the same thing but in actuality, only one of them does the thing they are supposed to.
I really want to love NixOS but it always ends up feeling like an exercise in my patience and time to do even the simplest of things. As such I find myself asking the question of, am I going to spend so much time reinstalling my distro that it’s ever worth this initial investment?
Anyways, rant over. I actually have been debating switching back over for another try again myself I just have some very frustrating memories of my first attempts with the distro.
Interesting, my first install of NixOS was done in a few hours and included a feature that I had not used in my previous Arch install, namely secure boot. It proved to be no issue whatsoever.
I do agree though that you’re looking of lost without search.nixos.org, and documentation is lacking. E.g. did you know that enabling Plasma sets your main font to Noto, regardless if you’re actually using Plasma or just have it as an option in your display manager? Or when to enable a program or service rather than adding it to your system packages? Or that if you install plain obs and some plugins, the plugins won’t actually work?
I do understand why this is the way it is and I do think it’s the better approach. But it’s not perfect.
On the other hand, my system works very well in daily usage.
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
Note that there’s both the rolling unstable channel and a bi-annual stable release channel.
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).
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?
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!
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 will switch as soon as I can get proprietary Nvidia drivers to work on my laptop.
That is the main reason I can’t use my laptop with linux. It has a 3060 in it. I work as a dev and need to use 2-3 external displays with my laptop. The driver combined with x or wayland is atrocious, I tried 20 distros and I can’t get it to work. The saddest thing is that none of the tech is exotic in any way. It’s just HDMIs and AOC 24 inch monitors…
All I year about from the linux community is NixOS and btrfs, neither of which I have any interest in. It almost feels like someone with an agenda is promoting these two with how prevelant they are.
I like using btrfs with Arch because of the snapshots. If an update breaks something I can just boot into a snapshot from grub keep using my PC and solve the problem later. It’s very useful… yes… very… you should try it… come… try btrfs… it’s warm and cozy… INSTALL IT!
I have tried btrfs in the past and when it goes wrong you are utterly shafted. You can’t even mount it as a read only file system, it will just lock you out entirely. And the support isn’t great, I ended up finding something that had a disclaimer along the lines of “only run this if you really know what you’re doing”, but obviously I didn’t as the documentation didn’t tell me enough to know. So the only people who could possibly know are the developers of the file system themselves. Anyway, I was 2 days in to trying to recover my data by this point so I gave it a go, nothing to lose - it refused to do anything. Great.
So in summary I’m not going to try it again.
can confirm, I’ve recently had my btrfs partition on NixOS go permanently read-only because it ran out of metadata space (which you can’t extend without write access, even though btrfs does reserve 0.5GB of metadata space) so I’ve switched to bcachefs
Well, I’ve been sold on sold on btrfs for over a decade. If you’re telling me NixOS is just as great I just might have to give it a try.
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.
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 actually installed it after reading this and I have to say it’s pretty fucking sweet.
Compiling your own stuff is a bit unintuitive but overall I love it
