NixOS is more complicated than you think but OpenCode fixed it | Hacker News Reader

NixOS is more complicated than you think but OpenCode fixed it

grigio.org

17 pointsgrigio14 comments

How is this low-effort zero-value non-article even on the first page of HN in the first place?

Agree but I think it’s interesting to discuss the larger implication here. Nix the language and ecosystem has historically been completely unapproachable for people unwilling to beat their head against the wall continuously to figure it out. It is famously unapproachable. Now, the benefits are accessible to the quasi-layman. Good news all around

Friends/bots upvotes. It's like the only way to get your post on first page nowadays.

Did you see the 26 minute long video?

I'm not sure how much of this is complicated because of NixOS; going this far off the beaten path would be rather complicated in any distro.

I'd be a lot more sure if the author had posted their nixos configuration somewhere...

> Ultra lightweight

Doesn't nixos use a lot more diskspace than arch, because of its store?

It seems like the "lightweight" they seem to be concerned with is RAM, not disc. I can't really comment on disc space usage on my own NixOS system, though my "thin client" skin does fit nicely on an old Chromebook, I think that guy has 32GB of storage.

I’ll just say as nix Darwin user the default vanilla install does not garbage collect well and every 2 months or so I have to hack around nuking shit in my system to free up space. Maybe NixOS itself is better managed and it’s an idiosyncrasy of nix-Darwin. Maybe not

I like the sound of nix but the disk space issue is a deal breaker for me - my sdd is always full.

I run my main arch system in under 6GB. That's enough for qemu and wine and a few other bits which is all I need - the rest is in VMs

Would like to switch it to nix though..

I think, like everything with Nix, if you recite the correct incantation for configuration you can avoid this issue. But it’s not default behavior

OTOH I have an ex Chromebook with 16G of storage that I meant to run NixOS until I discovered the initial install needed almost half the disk so I figured it was doomed the moment I tried to update while also having some space used in home. It runs Alpine now, very comfortably.

I've had a similar experience with NixOS configured by Claude Code, and it's been really nice. I have the same config on 3 machines, all managed in one git repo, including home manager and sops, and one of the machines I skin as a "thin client" removing most of my development tools and just using it to SSH/wezterm in to my main dev box, on a small and light ex-chromebook.

How is this considered “repeatable” when it takes several pages to describe how it’s glued together? By the same logic the pyramids of Giza are repeatable. Technically true, but not likely worth the effort.

It took several hours to do the first time, and it will take several hours to do the next time. Sounds repeatable to me :)

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