Hacker News Reader

Comment by a012 | Hacker News Reader

I was tempting to install NixOS on my PC but found out their installation method is fully involved of dozens of manual steps [1]. And I feel exhausted just reading their guide, so I don't want to try at all.

1 - https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-installation

View on HN

The list is a bit thorough and mixes a few possible scenarios. Basically what you need to do is:

1. Copy the ISO onto a USB drive and boot your laptop on it

2. Run `systemctl start display-manager` to start the GUI

3. Format the harddrive however you like using GParted

3b. EDIT: and mount the root drive to /mnt

4. Run `nixos-generate-config --root /mnt` to detect the hardware layout and generate an initial configuration.nix file

5. Open the /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix file with your editor and edit to your convenience

6. Run `nixos-install`

7. Reboot

Thank you, concision makes it easier for me to understand the process.

I've tried that a couple times on my own HP Proliant Server ML110 Gen9. The installation proceeds perfectly, no error whatsoever but no way I can get it to boot from the HD. I'm finding UEFI quite hard to debug when compared to MBR + GRUB... I find it odd that the pendrive boots fine, the installation happens well but the HD will not boot.

I wish there were more tips for debugging UEFIon their guide.

To each their own I guess. I strongly prefer their method. It let's me set up my system exactly how I want without having to fight with some GUI installer to make sure it doesn't do anything stupid. And hey, you might even learn a thing or two about how an OS works - partitions, boot loaders, init systems, it's all really quite important to understand when things go wrong and you need to recover your system manually.

I'm fine with setting up my boxes with Debian Installer and its preseed way, and it's straight forward and too easy to configure. But Nix is something else.

Learning how an OS works really is not quite important, except for a very small minority concerned with that field. That defeats the entire purpose of an OS, which is to provide an easy to use interface between hardware and software. I can't imagine telling anyone in my family this, and having them take me seriously. If they even understand what I just said.

And the result is that the general population can't fix even simple issues with their computers, and not even reinstall an OS.

Knowledge is great, but ignorance is bliss, I suppose :P

People shouldn't be responsible for knowing how to fix every piece of technology in their life. I doubt Linus could rebuild his car engine. I mean, everyone should know how to fix their ever increasingly complex car right? We have industrialized farming, so we're not spending our entire lives growing our own food, and hunting our own animals. This is how the world works. Should they know the basics of computer usage? Sure. Maybe if reinstalling a computer was one click of a button they should. But NixOS is so far beyond that, I wouldn't touch it either. I've got plenty of other things to work on, rather than fighting with an OS.

I'm not saying everybody needs to know everything about everything, but I'm really not happy about people's lack of IT knowledge in a world that is only getting even more technical.

People really should know just a little bit about stuff they use every day.

Cars have been around a lot longer than home computers have, and yet most people don't change their own oil.

I say this as a NixOS developer-- realistically the audience for a system like NixOS is fairly technical by design. It will likely never receive the kind of polish that would ever satisfy anyone in your family, or possibly even a technical person like yourself! I dislike that, but it's the truth.

Maybe the other developers disagree, but there are already plenty of Linux distributions that try extremely hard to be friendly and gentle, and remove needless technicalities -- and they even make it simple for developers! They could satisfy you or someone else! The developers put a lot of work into them, and that's really fantastic. But we'll probably never beat them at this; our design is a big enough departure from the traditional that it's very difficult to make it transparent. We're better off playing to our own strengths, IMO, rather than trying to polish off every single rough edge for ever user, to do something Linux distros with 10x the users and money, already offer, but better.

It's pretty understandable a lot of people would not like this trade off. I, personally, think NixOS is personally the best Linux distribution there is, of course -- but it's understandable why people would not like it, or these design choices. At all. I don't think I waste as much time as you might expect learning about Linux, but I do spend time doing things you probably wouldn't ever enjoy (like fixing upstream packages...)

-----

All of this said, we really should have a graphical installer. I'd love one. :) I'm just saying even if we fixed that, it's probably going to be the least of your issues in the long run, more or less... The installer is the tip of the iceberg.

Hey thanks for the response. Of course it's for the target audience, which was my overall message. The person I was responding to was arguing that people in general should know how an OS works, which is complete nonsense.

Rereading my response, I don't think that's at all what I was arguing for. I thought I was quite clear in qualifying the specific situation when I thought it would be helpful to know about lower level details. I'm sorry you interpreted it the way you did.

To be honest, at this point, nix is not for non-technical people. There's little benefit, and the design space hasn't been explored. That being said, nix would make a fantastic basis for a more end-user-oriented system, but the work would need to be put in.

Their install guide seems fairly standard for a minimal Linux distribution. They've even attempted to simplify it compared to what you would have to follow for an Arch install.

Agreed. I ran Nix for a while.. I love the concept of it, but I ended up bailing for a similar reason. I desired Nix because I wanted simplicity that immutability (conceptually) brings. Yet, the OS and especially dealing with non-immutable packages/etc were just way too much of a headache.

I left Nix hoping that in a few years it would be far friendlier. It really feels like the future.

I use NixOS daily, and the rough areas now are mostly lack of really thorough documentation and dealing with software that is not packaged for Nix and has an unclean way of getting built. It's surprising how many pieces of software have hardcoded paths to e.g. Python binaries.

My temporary fix for the latter is using a Docker with Arch for quick and dirty one-time things.

> the rough areas now are mostly lack of really thorough documentation and dealing with software that is not packaged for Nix

So basically the same problems as every other Linux distribution? Only AppImage doesn't work out of the box either.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Did you know Flatpak support is on the way? I'm hoping that it can help fill the void for applications which haven't made it into Nixpkgs yet. (And maybe for things we can't build from source, as much as I try to stay away from those.)

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/33371

Yes, my use-case is more complex sadly. It's more about installing some scientific binaries which are generally really dirty to build, in a quick and easy way.

I need them to reproduce other papers so I cannot stay away, sadly.

I think a better FHS or Steam.Env would help me more.

> and especially dealing with non-immutable packages

Are you saying that NixOS allows packages to cheat? That seems like a serious flaw.

If there's one thing worse than a non-purely-functional system, then it must be a system that claims to be purely-functional but turns out to be non-functional.

The packages themselves can't mutate, the nix store is read-only (except during installation). But some packages needs a global, mutable state (think databases), which is fine. What isn't fine is that some packages expect that mutable space to be in certain paths, and things get messy. Gitlab comes to mind as a service that's been extremely painful to get working under nixos because it expects its install path to be mutable.

There are ways to get around the immutability, but they are very highly discouraged and I haven't seen anybody use them other than newcomers. Think of it like `unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a` in Haskell.

Namely there is:

- Making the Nix store writable. Normally it's mounted read-only, and only the Nix daemon can write finished deterministic builds there. Often wanted by users who haven't learned how to handle Nix packages, as they just want to change some file in the store.

- Disabling the sandbox. Usually all builds are done in a sandbox which doesn't have network access, read access only to the Nix store and write access only to only the destination directory in the Nix store (with some exceptions), which gives strong reproducability guarantees.

I suspect the parent is referring to imperative package installs, i.e.

    nix-env -i firefox

This does create an immutable copy of Firefox in the Nix store, but it's not reproducible in the sense that the profile state isn't captured in a Nix expression.

Though there are a couple more declarative ways to handle user package installs.

e.g. https://github.com/gabesoft/nix-conf/blob/master/.nixpkgs/co...

> The NixOS installer doesn’t do any partitioning or formatting yet, so you need to do that yourself. Use the following commands:

Wow, you are not kidding.

Edit: I could swear this comment was originally replying to someone.

this is actually way more clear than the arch install "guide", which seem to have become hostile toward the idea of actually helping people in recent years.

You mean the text file in the home directory when installing? I found it very educational and easy to follow. It tells you how to configure e.g. the locale, the timezone, etc. as bare metal as possible, which makes it more reliable, and useful for other distros. Much more flexible and transparent than having an install wizard like they did before. Installing in a directory with pacstrap also made it very clear that it could be used for making archlinux containers. I love it.

I was referring to the removal of the "Beginner's Guide" in the wiki, now replaced by the "Installation Guide" that has way less context. Which is fine if you already have a nontrivial amount of linux/arch experience and just want to glance at a list of To Dos when you install. But is it really too much "bloat" to have a single example partition layout? I get the community doesn't like having to hand hold people, but sometimes people learn best by just getting things up and running and not reading 15 wiki pages before they're able to understand what should be a straightfoward guide. /rant

I honestly wasn't aware there was a text file in the home directory but it sounds like something pretty close to the Installation Guide, which is helpful and good to know, so thanks for that.

Some people enjoy that. Just look at Arch Linux.

Configuring your partitions and storage is scary and dangerous

On the flip side a friend of mine can literally reinstall her OS from backup in about 15 minutes, including all applications and their configuration.

Woops, was meant as reply to the GP.

Why? It's very simple. But if you're afraid of CLI tools, you can always partition with GParted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com