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Comment by anotherhue | Hacker News Reader

I've played this distro hopping game since I was a teenager and they were mailing free cds of this weird new south-african thing called Ubuntu which wasn't nearly as cool as the FreeBSD 5.0 release.

Enough of the astrological pseudo-science. This distro is good for hackers, use this if you want stability, use this for bleeding edge, this one is secure by default, that one has a nice UI, it's all nonsense.

The only meaningful changes have been: The effective mandatory adoption of SystemD, and the emergence of NixOS.

NixOS elevates the entire discussion. I can't wait for it to work across different UNIX kernels. It's not ready for regular people, it's not even ready for most enthusiasts, the language is awful and the nixpkgs set is full of inconsistencies, but it's all worth it.

So let's stop with the voodoo and start applying the techniques in other places. Nix without Nix is what we need.

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Your humble author here... Sadly, I've heard Nix is quite a ways away from being ready for the big leagues with the BSDs.

I'm quite a fan of its approach as well, maybe a little less so when disk space is a big concern like it often is for computer appliances.

you wouldn't be installing and forgetting loads of different versions of everything on computer appliances. you'd develop on a normal pc and then push just what's needed to the appliance.

on the dev pc you'd run garbage collection once your new env is acceptable and the old one gets removed.

>Nix without Nix is what we need.

OStree exists and is used in lots of places: https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/#operating-systems-and-di...

Agreed it's an excellent step, I confess I don't know if it answers the package building component however.

> Nix without Nix

So, GNU Guix?

I have only read about it but my takeaway was that it was like an opinionated sibling technology rather than a successor one.

I don't know what a successor would look like, I worry that it would have to wrangle with 40 years of software compilation techniques.

I would start with Gentoo, which has recipes to build stuff from scratch for just about everything.

I came from fbsd ports so agreed but that's what I'm saying, that's more thsn 20 year old tech and we should be able to improve.

You can use Nix to build derivations on at least some of the BSDs - so I guess if you wanted to build some BSD based appliance with Nix it is possible, but would take some doing…

> NixOS elevates the entire discussion.

NixOS and Docker and other Linux container and isolation madness only exist because the Linux illuminati can't admit that zones and ZFS got it right.

I wish Linux would just STFU and copy them already. Given the amount of code that has been spilled, Linux could have cleanroom reimplemented zones and ZFS 10 times over by now.

Thats only half of the picture. These tools gain traction because of orchestration and reproducibility. Nix, NixOS and Dockerfiles allow you to define an entire structure through infrastructure code. Is there something similar on any current BSD?

So... Linux literally has ZFS, ported wholesale from OpenSolaris, and is also homegrowing BTRFS and bcachefs as alternatives. I don't think zones could be ported as easily as ZFS, but LXC seems like a pretty close recreation, and honestly for most people I think docker was an improvement.

No, zones / jails are about isolation. I'm talking about composability and repeatability.

The process feels more like compiling a program than decorating a house.

Just use ZFS with Linux? It's been available as kernel modules for I don't know how long.

I was under the impression that was the much less reliable implementation of ZFS but maybe I'm remembering incorrectly.

No it's the one true implementation now. With original flavour developers and everything.

And HP-UX Vaults.

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