Am I out of touch?
No, it’s the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
Am I out of touch?
No, it’s the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
I went through a NixOS phase, and for a user that isn’t trying to maintain a dev environment, it’s a bloody lot of hassle.
I’m all behind immutable distros even though I don’t particularly have the need for them, but declaritive OSs are kinda niche.
I agree but I prefer it to things like ansible for sure. I’m also happy to never have to run 400 apt install commands in a specific order lest I have to start again from scratch on a new system.
Another place I swear by it is in the declaration of drives. I used to have to use a bash script on boot that would update fstab every time I booted (I mount an NFS volume in my LAN as if it were native to my machine) then unmount it on shutdown. With nix, I haven’t had to invent solutions for that weird quirk (and any other quirks) since day one because I simply declared it like so:
{ config, lib, pkgs, inputs, ... }: { fileSystems."/boot" = { device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/bort"; fsType = "vfat"; }; fileSystems."/" = { device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/lisa"; fsType = "ext4"; }; swapDevices = [ {device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/homer";} ]; fileSystems."/home/mrskinner/video" = { device = "192.168.8.130:/volume/video"; options = ["x-systemd.automount" "noauto"]; fsType = "nfs"; }; fileSystems."/home/mrskinner/Programming" = { device = "192.168.8.130:/volume/Programming"; options = ["x-systemd.automount" "noauto"]; fsType = "nfs"; }; fileSystems."/home/mrskinner/music" = { device = "192.168.8.130:/volume/music"; options = ["x-systemd.automount" "noauto"]; fsType = "nfs"; }; }IMO, where they really shine is in the context of declarative dev environments where the dependencies can be locked in place FOREVER if needed. I even use Nix to build OCI/Docker containers with their definitions declared right inside of my dev flake for situations where I have to work with people who hate the Nix way.
No end of interesting shit you can do in Nix, at one point I had zfs and ipfs entries in one of my configs. I got away from it all before flakes started to get popular.
I tried it as a docker host; the declarative formatting drove me around the bend. I get a fair bit of disaster proofing on my docker host with git and webhooks, besides using Proxmox/ZFS to host it all and back it up.
I suspect that the whole Docker thing will improve exponentially now that Nix is on the Docker’s radar. I found the OCI implementation to be superior to the actual Docker implementation in Nix…at least for now. I think the way that Docker isolates things to layers is the biggest barrier to them working together seamlessly at the moment…but I think they’ll start to converge technolgically over the coming 10 years to the point where they might work together as a standard someday.
i mean, provided that the OS has a proper graphical configurator (like most normie OSes), isn’t being declarative just a straight upgrade? Configure everything once when installing and then you never have to repeat that process again.
I think your “proper graphical configurator” is doing some heavy lifting there. Of course, there’s no such thing right now, so you’re dealing with the coding yourself in a pretty oddly designed syntactical language, and the terrible official documentation that is the current state of affairs to do it with.
Other than that, sure, a declaritive and atomic OS would be the way to go.
the thing is that distros like fedora and ubuntu have had them for ages
They’re the bees knees if you have a homelab, though.
Maybe homelab stuff that you mess with a lot and need to revert or stand up a multitude? I tried it for self-hosted apps and frankly a docker host is way easier. JB guys were pushing it for Nextcloud and it was a nightmare compared to the Docker AIO. I guess you could stand it up as a docker host OS, but I just use Debian, it’s pretty much bulletproof and again, less hassle.
I recently switched to nixos, because my ACME image was failing all of a sudden and I didn’t know enough what was going on under the hood to fix it.
It was a steep learning curve, but the infrastructure as code approach just works too well for me, since I just forget too much what I did three years ago, when doing things imperatively.