Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It has been my daily driver for coding, gaming and writing for 14 months now. I have also been using Linux since the late 1990s, and I really value the 100s of hours I've poured into NixOS to make my machines work the same between reinstalls.

I started on a work laptop, and moved the configuration to my home desktop; it instantly worked the same way. I copied the configuration to my gaming laptop, and when my desktop broke down, I could continue to use my gaming laptop as if it were the same computer.

Being able to copy-paste a few snippets and have Steam working was amazing.

> If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice.

It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.

But NixOS has a way of converting all your regular problems into Nix problems.

Here I am, trying to get back into Kubernetes.

But all I can focus on is how to install Kubernetes.

> It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.

My middle ground approach has been to use containers and fall back to a more traditional Linux approach within those containers when I don’t want to be bothered (or just don’t need) to figure out the Nix Way.

If it’s something that’s core to my daily setup, I’ll still invest the time to bake it into my NixOS config, but using fallbacks like this has been a good middle ground for me that allows me to take advantage of the best parts of NixOS without adding undue pain when spinning up experiments.

Even running containers is a Nix adventure in NixOS. Who needs docker-build when you have pkgs.dockerTools? Who needs docker-run when you have config.containers? Wait, you can also use nixos-container CLI, or embed your container in a systemd process. And so on. It never ends.

I use nixOS, do a ton of container development, and have never had issues or been confused about containers? I have two lines that enable docker in my nix config:

    virtualisation.docker.enable = true;
    users.extraGroups.docker.members = [ "green" ];

Since then, docker's been completely seamless. How far into kubernetes have you gone before? I'm a little confused about what you mean by "Install kubernetes". I used to use minikube but now use k3d, and those were both just packages available in nixpkgs. K8s (especially local k8s) is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but not because of NixOS

I opted for vanilla docker/podman. Not getting some of the Nixy benefits, but works well for my use cases.

I keep telling myself that of these days I need to play with the Nix way, but we’ll see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com