Linux

I wonder how many Nix cheerleaders are aware of OSTree based systems like Silverblue, Kinoite, Bazzite, etc? They provide the same immutability guarantees, but none of the pain and standards-defiance of NixOS.

I think Nix (the package manager) is a much stronger sell than NixOS. You can use Nix to install your apps on top of another immutable OS, whereas otherwise you might go with Flatpaks, containers, AppImages, etc. It's certainly better than adding Homebrew or some other manager like Pacman.

For devs, Nix is nice for people who can't or don't want to use containers for any reason (or want to use both!). I just don't see anyone benefiting from using NixOS except for Nix addicts.

Switching is hard, but going back is impossible.

Personally, i dream of a stateless, tag/attribute-based, tree-less operating system. "directories" would not be neccessary but a tag could be displayed as one in file managers. Want to load a library? type:library, name:xyz it is.
Stuff is there on the disk anyway, you just have to identify it.

But that would require the kernel, a file system and the tooling made for this.
But maybe we get there; since the young generation isn't used to file trees anymore.

It seems needlessly complicated. I installed it as a virt like I do with most distros and it seems like they are dumbing it all down to the point its headed toward android levels of needless complication.

This article is spot on. Fantastic operating system with a clear concept of how it should be done. And great for people that want to fight for it. But everything you want to do that's slightly off the path is a 3 hour research project in documentation that's pretty damn poor. It eventually wears you out.

This lets Gentoo look like a beginner/user-friendly distro next to NixOS.

The fact that my OS should not be a project anymore made me switch to Debian instead to NixOS. But I need to try an immutable distro some time.

I also think- how often am I borking or reinstalling my desktop?

It's a good idea but I've been running the same system for years and years. All that effort goes kind of unused. I replicated most of what I'd need in a single ansible playbook over the years that didn't take long. In the rare event I need to reinstall at all.

NixOS has some neat ideas but goes to the deep end implementing a near-perfect design of those ideas. If you need those ideas, it's really great.

I'm fantasizing about doing a lipstick-on-pig kind of a facsimile of NixOS on top of Arch Linux.

The problem is that NixOS achieves all of this by breaking assumptions that almost all Linux software relies on. Most Linux binaries assume the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard exists, and they expect interpreters and libraries at fixed global paths.

This is a problem of those applications, we began to make appimages that do not make those assumptions and work in NixOS directly. (And this also means it works in places like alpine where a lot of those binaries wont either).

People like to throw the FHS around but the reality is that not a single distro follows it fully, I wouldn't rely on it to be the same in the near future at all.

Damn right. And the Nixos community forums are full of people unwilling to accept this. They will gaslight you into thinking you're the problem. "Just do this", as I'd it's completely obvious and you're dumb for not realising that. Of course if they find out you have some ideological incompatibility with them, you're out anyway.

NIXOS really needs a fork. One that embraces or rejects flakes outright. One that stops inviting ideological battles. And one that embraces documentation.

Lol love the title.

I feel the same about KDE on Wayland, it's amazing but it's not stable enough yet.

Took my laptop to work and it had a stroke when I plugged it into the office monitors

Fuck nix and anduril, go guix!