Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

I've been tempted to use NixOS for my self hosted setup but I just can't bring myself to do it.

My setup is quite simple, it's just a few VMs with one docker compose file for each. I have an ansible playbook that copies the docker compose files across and that's it. There's really nothing more to it then that, and maintenance is just upgrading the OS (Fedora Server) once the version reaches EOL. I tend to stay 1 version behind the release cycle so upgrade whenever that gets bumped.

I do use nix-darwin on my macs so I do _see_ the value of using a nix configuration, but I find it difficult to see if the effort in porting my setup to Nix is worth it in the long run, configuration files don't get written in a short time. Maybe LLMs could speed this up, but I just don't have it in me right now to make that leap

> I've been tempted to use NixOS for my self hosted setup but I just can't bring myself to do it.

I recently tried nixos and after spending a week trying it out, I switched my home network and 2 production servers to nixos. It has been running as expected for 3,4 months now and I LOVE it. Migrating the servers was way easier than the workstations. My homeserver was setup in a few hours.

I also recently bought a jetson orin nano to play and learn on and I set up nixos with jetpack-nixos there too. I know with gentoo this would have been a (much) more painful process.

I have used gentoo for over 20 years and have always felt very much at home. What annoyed me was that the compile times on older computers were simply unbearable. Compiling GHC on my 2019 dell xps just takes 6 hours or something like that.

The big difference for me was NixOS provides really simple rollbacks if something goes wrong, where with Ansible and compose files, that's possible, but you have to do it yourself

But also if you're setup is working for you, I think that's great! It sounds like you have a good system in place

Explored it a bit, but found the incremental gain to be not massive if you're already using IaC of some sort

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