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Comment by blacktriangle | Hacker News Reader

It made me switch from Linux.

If it doesn't sound compelling to you, that's okay too, Linux is great. But I do think focusing on the consistency of design really is the best high-level summary of the difference between Linux and OpenBSD.

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Consistency is great, but there's no equivalent to NixOS for the BSDs -- that I know of.

Am I actually wrong about that? Is there some declarative configuration system I should be using, which I've simply never heard of?

I think we're talking about different definitions of consistency.

In the BSD context, consistancy is that human effort has been put in to get the userspace to look similar. Similar behavior of command line tools, similar documentation, similar configuration, etc.

It looks like you're talking about consistancy of packages across installs, which is a totally different issue.

No, that's the sort of consistency I was thinking of. I simply want that and all the niceties I'd get from NixOS.

I was actually looking into this as well. I recently switched my server to NixOS and the declarative configuration has been really nice to work with and fits easily into my workflow/tools (emacs with tramp).

I’d be really interested in seeing a variant on top of openbsd that has a comparable declarative layer. If anyone knows of such projects, please share!

There are a couple issues tracking FreeBSD support for Nix [0,1], the package manager indicating it works there. Depending on the level of integration you want that might be sufficient, that would already be enough to generate the system config files for example, but to get the sort of integration you get on NixOS with different generations and the ability to rollback at boot would require more work. This would look something more like nix-darwin [2] than NixOS really.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if OpenBSD works too, I might spin up a VM and see...

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/3280

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/81459

[2] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

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