You forget the step "find out what to write in the nix config file". Might take anywhere from less than a minute to forever, depending on experience, google-fu, and documentation.
From OS point of view you no longer need:
- Kickstart
- Ansible, Saltstack et.al.
- Custom package repo for custom packages (if you need to customize something)
There are other areas too:
- create common developent environment, makes sure every developer has exactly the same tools installed with exactly same versions, so no more "it doesn't work on my machine"
- build system
- CI/CD
- packaging (as mentioned, you no longer need artifactory, instead you can have nix cache)
- there is also potential to use it for IaC, there's NixOps, but currently this is maybe the weakest part of Nix, it only covers deploying a box, but if you want to do something more complex, like autoscaled service it gets in the way. It is great for developing a new image though. There are terraform integrations, I didn't try them yet, might work better.
- you can configure local developer machine to use build system for local builds as well. If caching is configured, then once code is deployed it will already cache good build so it doesn't need to redo it
- for personal use with things like home-manager it can replace dot files as do more, you can have the same environment each time. Let say you change job and get a new laptop you can have it quickly set up the way you want it
Maybe if I was a sysadmin managing a herd of boxen I would like this, but for a guy with only two Linux systems (plus my mac, plus my windows boxes, plus my openbsd pcengines etc.), it seems like a lot of fuckery with text files for little to no actual improvement in my UX.
You put in there what packages you want installed, what users, what SSH keys, what services systemd manages.
Then, you run `nixos-rebuild` and then you switch your system to that configuration. The old state of your system stays around until you run garbage collect. So you can rollback to it, if you want.
Seems like it comes much easier to most people to issue series of (often nondeterministic) commands that mutate state rather than learning a new language that allows describing dependencies and have it figure out steps needed.
The issue to me is that it's mostly a regression and that when showed nix/guix people would squint saying it's horrible.. when in fact docker way is horrible, it's just nicer to them.
Alas, such is society.
If all you do is apt-get install docker, that doesn't feel like a very complete set up to me.
I can already do that with Kickstart for rpm distros, though.
How often are people doing this, though? I get a machine set up pretty quickly (install list of packages, systemctl enable <foo bar baz>, reboot), and I'm set for several years.
I'm quite new to NixOS and recently tried home manager, which basically manages your home, primarily all dot files, but goes as far as preinstalling favorite extensions on Firefox for example.
When you're solo there's no such restrictions, you can just use the nicest tech that's out there. I've been amateur-adminning debian/arch/ubuntu machines for 15 years now, NixOS is such a relief to be rid of that mess.
In what way? Why are functionally-declarative system configs good? What does the increased workload gain me over my usual list-of-packages-to-apt-get?
... at least that's my experience.
I am sorry but that is fanfiction that nix people want to believe. There are numerous reasons not to use nix, a few: - Incredibly smaller community - Incredibly smaller support from community and enterprise - Yet another programming language - that is difficult to grok
Those alone can kill any technically sound project, but there are lots of others. Such as slow installs, storage requirements etc.