NixOS 20.09 Released | Hacker News Reader

NixOS 20.09 Released

nixos.org

I've been using NixOS on all my devices for 2 years now, and it's great to have easy reproducible systems.

NixOS design gives it a robustness that is missing from taking a mutable distro and applying mutations (via Puppet/Ansible/Chef) to it.

After using it for a few weeks it feels like everyone else got package and config management kind of wrong.

Nix really shines when I’ve started to use nix-shell for different projects - can recommend!

Best way to describe it is that the os is no longer kind of a ”repl”.

Yes, a classic Linux distro feels like a REPL or writing in assembly/m4. NixOS turns a machine into a compiled program.

What can I do with it? Does it support KDE settings already? Can I pick a new laptop, put the config, and replicate the system?

Last time I've checked, it could just install packages and some other stuff, which is the smallest of the problems.

Depends on what u want to do with it, I had the same config for a dedicated server at hetzner(nixos) , desktop, laptop with just a flag depending on the features I needed (server with xrdp, laptop with i3, desktop with KDE)

U can replicate the system to anything, even build new config in a vm in seconds, or turn it to a USB stick, or iso, but u need to manually copy the home folder ofc

It rather sounds as if u only read about Nix and not Nixos and the integrated ecosystem

The best part about NixOS is I can hack around on Linux through it fearlessly (due to immutability). And once I do something useful, I can abstract over it so I (and others!) never have to solve it the hard way again.

My holy grail is a synthesis of Qubes and NixOS, with the display VM running a Wayland compositor, dom0 doling out input events, and the VMs running X or whatever to their frame buffers. Best of all worlds, given enough RAM.

But how to give the VMs access to GPUs? A vulkan virtualization layer?

check spectrum https://spectrum-os.org/ ;)

Thank you, checking.

Great job everyone!

NixOS is most up to date and top three in number of packages :0

That is amazing! I love the Nix community, so happy to be a part of it.

See also that there are comparatively few maintainers, despite having a large amount of up to date packages.

This is the result of treating a distro as a software problem, versus the manual processes used in Debian, for example.

Which just means that the NixOS model scales better. While it is true that NixOS has a shortage of maintainers with commit privileges, I fail to see how that makes the "manual process" any better. Besides, all packages in NixOS still go through manual review, you know.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the maintainer shortage problem is a result of a series of policy decisions surrounding NixOS, and not even something inherent to Nix.

My comment was meant to demonstrate the effectiveness of the NixOS model. Debian relies on the blood, sweat and tears of maintainers, with weak steps towards automation: ( https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin... https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_leaving/

> My comment was meant to demonstrate the effectiveness of the NixOS model

Sorry, it looks like I misunderstood your comment.

> Debian relies on the blood, sweat and tears of maintainers, with weak steps towards automation

I do wonder how they manage to maintain the number and quality of their packages sometimes.

I’m always struck by how much large systems tend to have release notes that amount to “nothing major” and thousands of commits.

Of course, in every last one of these grab bags of minor changes there’s something that makes all of the difference for hundreds of people or more.

Are you talking about this article? As far as I can see, the release manual linked in this article details "major" changes that users should watch out for: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes.html#sec...

Yeah, that’s the list I read. As I say, it’s a long list of things where you’ll probably care about a few, but not care about most. But which few matter to you differs from person to person.

How does the number of packages in nixos compare to, say, arch's aur? Looking around, I see a decent selection, but I figured I would get more feedback from the community.

Also, what don't you like about nixos?

The article links to a page comparing the statistics of different package repositories: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest.

According to repology.org, NixOS outnumbers any other distros in terms of up-to-date packages[1]. And the best part is, each and every one of these packages in NixOS goes through proper review.

I personally don't find any major annoyances with NixOS so far, but a lot of people do complain about the Nix language being a high barrier to entry though. However, once you grasp the basics, it makes it really easy to create your own custom packages for your favorite software thanks to the rich facilities built on top of the Nix language that just doesn't match any other system packaging tools.

[1]: https://repology.org/graph/map_repo_size_fresh.svg

Packages are tend to be old. That's the downside of using nix over other package managers.

Stuff like filebeat from ELK stack is like a year old version.

Some are of course up to date but for less popular ones, you would look elsewhere to install.

To bad because I like how I can install things the same for macOS and Linux, unlike Homebrew whicu gets installed in some weird /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/ dir and shell config needs to be changed.

> Packages are tend to be old. That's the downside of using nix over other package managers.

The stats from repology say otherwise. NixOS is the most up-to-date distro in existence.

> Some are of course up to date but for less popular ones, you would look elsewhere to install.

For less popular ones, it's more likely that the package won't even exist on other distros given the number of packages in nixpkgs.

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